Freaks
by notmanos
Summary: Movieverse,before Logan met the XMenIn a small town, Logan stumbles onto the murder of a mutant, and an even greater conspiracy.
1. Part 1

Disclaimer:The character of Logan is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. 

FREAKS  
_______ 

14 Years Earlier - Whitewater, Alberta, Canada 

**** 

    "Kill 'im!" The crowd shouted, sounding like a single bloodthirsty voice. "Kill 'im!" 

The guy was built like a Coke machine and just about as as heavy, with stumpy legs that didn't taper from the thighs but went straight down to ankles just as thick, like he was a badly drawn figure sketched by a far sighted child with bad coordination. That might have explained his face, which seemed to wide and egg like for his features, which all seemed crammed in the center. To say he was ugly was to say a hippo was slightly overweight - a gross understatement. 

The lights gleamed on his bald head, making it look like a yellowed hide processed to a sheen, and his tiny eyes, like thumbprints in dough, squinted down at him. Logan looked up at him, and wondered if the guy's parent's relentlessly smashed his face in with a snow shovel when he was an infant, or he really grew to look that way naturally. Kinda sad either way. 

The redneck kicked him hard in the stomach, and Logan rolled with it to the far side of the sweat and blood stained mat, arms around his gut as the pain rippled through him. It didn't stay long, and there was no burning sensation afterwards, so he knew he'd never been really injured. It took him a while to realize that that burning thing was related to the fact that he healed from everything - in retrospect, it was idiotic that he never realized that before. But then again, he still didn't know what his full name was. 

He waited for the behemoth to stomp across the mat towards him, listening to the chants for blood and the occasional, sporadic boos from the crowd. They smelled like body odor and frustration; testosterone and alcohol; sawdust and adrenaline. It was worse than the flop sweat and aimless rage this big slab of brainless beef was exuding. "Get  up, you ugly fucker," the redneck growled. 

Logan glared up at him. "You're callin' me ugly?" That was honestly the final straw. 

He hadn't wanted to do this. He hadn't wanted to get involved in this shitty redneck "sport" - bare knuckle boxing and "ultimate fighting", where two thick necked yahoos beat the shit out of each other for the amusement of other drunken yahoos, and for nothing more than bragging rights and the pot, which never added up to more than a couple hundred bucks or so. 

But Logan needed the money. 

He had nothing - no full name, no clothes ( what he had he had stolen from currently empty holiday cabins up in the mountains - and his dog tags, if they counted ), no home, no vehicle ( except the stolen truck, but he had to dump that when the cops got too close ), no job, no purpose, no memory. Well, no memories worth having, anyways. 

How long had it been? A year? More? Honestly, some of the time sort of blurred together, especially those first six months (?) after he woke up in the snow. It was like his mind had been torn to pieces, a fragile part of his body that had never even tried to heal. Eventually the limited things he understood - that his name was Logan, in spite of the dog tags that inexplicably read "Wolverine"; that things that would hurt others never hurt him for very long ; and that he had to avoid people, because people were after him, and they were out to hurt him - grew to include more things, and he got tired of living in the cabins and chalets of people he didn't know, people whose spaces and things he borrowed so he could continue hiding out in the Canadian Rockies ( he eventually figured out where he was, but that hadn't been easy either ) from a threat he wouldn't have recognized if it walked right up to him and bit him on the ass. Frankly, it had pissed him off - why was he so scared? He was Logan, he was Wolverine - he didn't know much, but he knew he wasn't scared of anyone. 

Except the hooded men in his dreams, but that was something else entirely. 

He had learned, once he had gotten into the redneck ass stomping business, one important thing: he couldn't immediately win. Much of the evening's take depended on the audience betting on the fights, and if it looked like there was no challenge at all, there were no bets placed, ergo no money for him. Also, the crowd wasn't there for edification or enlightenment - they wanted to see blood; they wanted to see two guys wail on each other. One knocking the other out instantly seemed to put a damper on festivities. 

He didn't want to play to these cretins, these booger picking morons who got off on other people's pain and yet would beat down anyone who suggested there was something homo-erotic in their obviously glee over watching two men go at each other violently - they didn't even have that level of self-awareness, irony, or whatever you wanted to call it. They were terminally bored, drunken fucks who didn't have anything better to do. But what did that make him? 

Desperate, of course. Desperately in need of cash to get ... well, the fuck out of here. Away from these last bastions of supposed civilizations, broken down towns built around old logging and mining camps, factories where these guys slaved in virtual snowbound isolation for half the year. There were some women around here, but evenly split between hard bitten, sour types who had come here to get away from the rest of society ( like most of the men ), or the big haired bimbos who were inevitably someone's wife, or a working girl who was definitely not into manual labor - or at least not the type involving heavy machinery. 

He had some money saved up from other matches such as these, but not nearly enough - between the trial and error of learning how to make a pseudo - living at this, and living expenses ( beer, food - he seemed to need more food after he was genuinely hurt, making him think that the level of healing he needed to do affected his metabolism somehow. Was that possible? - some clothes he was forced to buy when the stuff he stole got torn or bloody, and now cheap rooms since he had to abandon the truck ... and sometimes paying for damages when his nightmares or his temper got out of control ), he was forced back into the circuit. The problem was he had to keep moving around, as not only did these guys get to know his name and the fact that he seemingly couldn't get beaten, but also he hated to stay in one place for too long. Something in him wouldn't let him; some instinct he had, overwhelming and not easily suppressed, told him he had to keep moving. He obeyed it because he had to - otherwise he got no sleep at all. It was hard enough sleeping as it was. 

Logan knew logically if he threw a fight now and again, he could stay longer at these sorts of places. If there was some chance of him being beaten, it would get him more opponents, and the promoters would be happier , but he couldn't take the act that far. It was bad enough letting these stupid assholes beat on him for a while; it just made him angry. And he could only get so furious before his anger completely got away from him - most of the time he just had this free floating rage inside him, and it seemed difficult to contain even when nothing was actively pissing him off. And sometimes, when he really was pissed off, he felt like a bomb two seconds away from exploding. 

None of these men ever really understood the danger they were in. Even when he decided to finally beat their asses down, he was holding back; if he didn't, it was possible he would kill them. He knew he could; he knew where to punch them to cleanly and lethally fracture the skull; he knew which vertebras, if broken, would be fatal; he knew where to hit to turn certain organs into pulp - he knew all of this without ever knowing how. He could easily kill people with his hands ... and that didn't even included the blades hidden within them. 

If these assholes knew about them, they'd probably shit their pants. 

Logan jumped up to his feet, and that encouraged the goon to rush him. He turned and slammed a sharp elbow into the center of his butt ugly face. 

His nose shattered with a noise like the snap of a branch, and he reeled backwards as if shot, grabbing his face as blood spurted from his ruined nose. The crowd booed even louder, and someone threw a cup of weak beer that splattered against the chicken wire fence protecting the fighters from the crowd, splashing beer on them and the mat. Logan knew this particular melange of smells - beer, blood, sweat - encapsulated his life as of late far too perfectly, but he decided not to think about that right now. 

He stalked towards his opponent, snarling at him as he let his anger bubble to the surface, and growled, "I've seen dog's asses that look better than you, motherfucker. You should pay me for workin' your face over - it can only be an improvement." 

"Cocksucker!" He roared, his voice muffled by his hands. "You broke my fuckin' nose!" 

"I'm gonna break more than that." 

The guy took a wild roundhouse swing at him with a bloodied, meaty fist, and Logan just dodged it easily, planting a firm kick in the redneck's bulging gut. He doubled over, gagging slightly as blood and saliva splattered on the canvas, and Logan rammed his knee up into his face, sending him falling back onto his fat ass. He wasn't unconscious yet, but he was barely hanging on. 

The audience was making a noise like a moose in a tunnel now - a sort of bizarre uber-boo that rebounded oddly off the tin walls of the outbuilding turned mock arena, and almost made Logan laugh. 

Oh, fuck it, he did laugh, and the redneck looked up at him like he was insane, his piggy eyes all whites, one of his front teeth hanging crooked and sending a trickle of blood down his chin. "What the fuck are you laughing at?" He lisped slightly when he talked, sending a spray of pinkish spittle over his already gore stained jeans. This was the last fight of the night, the "championship", and he had fought his way through nine other losers just like this one. At first they collectively thought he was nuts for stripping down to his jeans and his dog tags before the first fight, but now everyone seemed to get it - not only was it hot under the lights, but blood stained his jeans, and would have stained his shirt and boots if he had bothered to keep them on. Now he seemed smarter than everyone else, but hell, he was. 

"You," Logan spat, kicking him in his already ruined face. He splayed out on his back like a beached whale, out cold and down for the night. The crowd booed even louder, and he continued to snicker as he returned to his corner and the guy by the ring shouted into his cheap mike, which was feeding back just enough to make Logan wince. 

He wasn't just laughing at that fuck - he was laughing at the crowd, at this whole great unwashed mass watching them and getting off on this blood. The aimless tribe of Humans, who'd move from simply disliking him because he was an outsider who rolled into town and started kicking all the local asses to pure, unadulterated hate if they knew what he really was. 

A couple more cups of watered down beer hit the chickenwire, but none got anywhere near him as he toweled off some of the blood on his chest, face and hands, and then slipped on his undershirt. Spring still hadn't made its way this far up North, so he had layers to don - t-shirt, flannel shirt, stolen denim jacket, fleece lined leather jacket he bought at a thrift store for twenty bucks. Didn't take him long, as he had it down to a science by now, just like these fights. 

The audience, still grumbling, had mostly filtered out into the main bar, letting in cold blasts of outside air that were refreshing, and helped push out some of the cloying human smells, replacing them with snow and car exhaust. A couple guys came in to drag the redneck out, leaving behind a huge smear of blood on the off white canvas, and he could feel the evil stares they gave him as he turned his back on them. If they could have seen his face, they'd have seen him smiling at their hate - like he gave a fuck. Like they were any challenge for him. 

He was sitting on the inverted milk crate used as a step, finishing putting on his socks and boots, when Pat, the bar owner/fight "promoter", came over to him, sighing like a martyr. The four days he had been in Whitewater, he'd learned to abhor the man - he was average height and thick waisted in that middle aged spread sort of way, with a large round face slowly growing jowls. He already had deep enough bags under his slightly rheumy grey eyes that he could have hidden spare change in them. "I've never done this before, Logan," he said, running a hand nervously through his thick black hair. He dyed it; Logan could smell the chemicals when he sweated. What kind of vain man dyed his hair, and yet kept the beer gut going? 

Logan glanced up at him as he finished lacing up his boots. He had done this enough that he knew what was coming. "You're kicking me out." 

Pat looked stunned - he may have resembled an insurance company executive, but he could act when he had to. "No, not exactly. Look, I don't need to tell you you're good - " 

"Good?" He repeated, staring at him. He was the best, and they both knew it; there was no one who could beat him in the ring. And that of course was the problem. That was always the problem. 

Pat looked away from his eyes and at the cold concrete floor, unable to hold his gaze. Supposedly, many people found him intimidating - who'd have guessed? "You're the best fighter I've ever seen. But that's why I have to ask you to step down. The bets are goin' down - no one wants to bet against you anymore! And you could keep fightin' if you wanted to, but you wouldn't get paid." 

Logan looked at him sharply. "I'm gettin' paid for tonight." 

Pat backed up a step, holding up his hands. "Of course! I'm not going to cheat you. It's just that this has to be the last night. You understand." Pat was an oily user who would cheat him if he could, but he was afraid of him, and they both knew it. But Pat was afraid of him because he thought he was a psychotic drifter - he couldn't help but wonder what would happen if he ever put it together that he was a mutant on top of being a psychotic drifter. 

"Fine. I was only in it for the money." He stood up, and Pat took another step back. Could he have been more obvious in his fear? "Back in your office?" 

"As always," he quickly agreed. He never paid out front, probably so the patrons never realized how much money they wasted on this shit. 

Logan followed him back into the main bar, sinking into his coat against the chill, as the night had turned brutally cold. It wasn't snowing, but the air felt too dry and frigid to contain any moisture. The lights surrounding the warehouse sized collection of buildings and quonset huts pooled on the rock hard layer of snow like frozen puddles of sun, and made him avert his eyes until they adjusted to the pockets of glare. It didn't take long. 

The main bar was the largest of the buildings, a shell containing the old wooden bar surrounded by the tin husk of an old airplane hangar, presumably to protect it from the elements and the clients themselves. After the outside, it was almost too warm in here, the collective body heat of the patrons also contributing a far too Human smell he really could have lived without. That was the real downside to having better than average senses - and he assumed they were, because no one else ever seemed to notice these things. Or maybe they were just better at hiding their reactions. 

A radio droned in one corner, giving weather and road clearing updates, while a t.v. over the bar blared out the ubiquitous hockey game. He got a few dirty looks from guys who lost money on him or friends of jerks he pummeled into a fine paste, but it never went farther than that - not only was he with the bar owner, but hell, he beat the shit out of their friends! What the fuck were they gonna do? 

In the claustrophobic back office, pretty much filled in its entirety with a weathered oaken desk and an office chair, Pat paid him out his two hundred and sixty two bucks in cash. Not as good as the first night, but not falling off as fast as Pat seemed to indicate, unless he padded the take as a way of getting him to shove off without protest. Either way he didn't care - he now had enough to buy that truck from that guy and get the fuck out of here. 

It was just a beater the guy wanted three fifty for, but Logan had talked him down to three hundred in cash, as the guy was as desperate for money as he was; this area wasn't so much depressed as ground down under foot. But it was sad areas like this where he could essentially blend in, move without being noticed too much - he was just another transient, another guy hard done by life. But none of them had any idea how true that actually was, nor would they ever, as he wasn't about to tell them. 

Logan ventured out into the smelly, noisy main bar to have a drink. The late night bartender, Benjy, was on, a sour faced old coot who looked like he had sucked on a lemon one too many times in his life, and his face just stuck that way. But at least he was equally rude to everyone, and Logan liked that about him. 

He took his usual stool at the end of the beaten down wooden bar, a seat that gave him the best view of the entire room, and got his usual beer in  the usual mostly clean mug. He pretended to watch the game as he glanced around, lighting up a cigar, and after a few minutes he noticed Fidget come in. 

Okay, so the kid's actual name was Gordon, judging from someone calling him "Gordie", but he couldn't help but think of him as Fidget because that's what he did - he seemed like a live wire of anxiety, almost vibrating with it as he tried to find a lift out of here. That was why the pass report was constantly playing on the radio now - the main pass had been blocked since the day before yesterday by an avalanche in the higher elevations. It should have been cleared by now, but it had been snowing nonstop up there, and last night there had been another slide. Not that it mattered so much here - this wasn't a major transit point. But someone hadn't told Fidget that. 

Even though Logan had only seen him in here last night, and he had never dared talk to him, it was clear the kid was afraid of something. Maybe he was on the run from the cops - he wouldn't be the only one up here - or just your run of the mill runaway who wanted to blow this boring dump before his brain turned to mush, or he got snowed in until the spring thaw. 

The kid couldn't have been more than seventeen. He was shorter than average height but very thin and lanky, like his limbs were slightly longer than they should have been. His eyes were so pale blue they were almost clear, and his hair followed that pale theme, being basically as white as snow. Someone had asked him why he dyed it that color, and Logan couldn't remember what excuse he gave, but the kid was lying - he didn't smell like dye, not like Pat; his hair was naturally white. He wasn't an albino, so maybe it was just some oddity of birth. Or he wasn't exactly Human either. 

Fidget did his usual rounds, asking if anyone was heading out ( no one was ), and he gave up earlier than the night before. He must have heard the pass was still blocked and he was completely out of luck, but he continued to be twitchy with nerves; he hadn't completely accepted the inevitable. 

He went up to the opposite end of the bar and ordered a soda, either aware that Benjy would never serve him a beer, or because he was straight edge and didn't drink. Fine, more for him. 

It was inevitable, he supposed. Fidget bugged everyone yesterday, but not him - and now, of course, he was going to bug him. After getting his soda, he came down to his end of the bar, even though Logan had already started ignoring him and pretending he was interested in the Vancouver Canucks. "Hey, uh, I have to thank you," Fidget began nervously. Even his voice had an anxious edge to it. "I won some money on you tonight, and that was ... I have no luck at all, so that was great." 

Logan was giving him his best "fuck off and die" stare, but Fidget didn't seem to notice. Fidget was glancing nervously around the room, like his eyes just couldn't keep still, but it wasn't that - Logan could pick up the sour taint of fear coming off of him, but just as an undertone: controlled panic. Was he afraid of him, something else, or both? "I mean, you're amazing," Fidget went on. "I mean, totally awesome. I know a lot of the guys around here give you shit, but I wish I could fight like you. I mean, you must work out a lot, huh? Are you like one of those martial arts guys? 'Cause I always wanted to do that, you know, but hey, not a lot of call for it around these parts. It'd be cool though, 'specially if I could look like you, you know, all built and stuff - " 

He was going to tell him to shut the fuck up and shove the fuck off, because he didn't need this kid having diarrhea of the mouth around him, but his constant references to his physique finally made the penny drop. Logan sighed out a cloud of cigar smoke, and said, "Look, kid, I'm flattered, but I don't go that way." 

Fidget finally looked at him, mildly surprised. He could see that his irises were limned with white - most people's were lined with black, weren't they? Maybe that's what seemed odd about his eyes. "Huh? Oh, you mean leaving? that's okay, I - " Then the penny dropped for him, and he understood he wasn't talking about giving him that kind of ride. "Oh. Oh, well, uh ... worth a shot, I guess." He then forced a chuckle, and said, "Thanks for not punchin' me out." 

Although he said it like it was a joke, he got a feeling it wasn't actually much of one. In a small place like this, having white hair was bad enough - being gay on top of it? It was probably the equivalent of waving a sign reading "Please beat me like a red headed stepchild". He wondered if he had been punched out - or worse - for coming on to the wrong guy, and then was immediately annoyed because he never wanted to feel an ounce of pity for anyone, especially Fidget. Life was shitty, and some people just got dealt shittier hands than others, and he should know. Any person worth their salt could deal with it - end of story. 

As Logan tapped an ash out into the ashtray, he noticed that Fidget's hand, flat on the bar, seemed flatter than it should, his fingertips wider, as if his hand was ... decompressing somehow, like it was made of soft clay instead of flesh and bone. He glanced up at him curiously, and he could smell a sudden spike of fear as Fidget figured out what he had seen, and let his hand plump back up to normal. He smiled tightly, nervously, flop sweat popping out on his pale brow, and Logan knew then he was a mutant - and Fidget didn't know he was a mutant too, hence his fear that the beating would now commence, and he'd inform the rest of the bar they had a goddamn freak in the place. What kind of horribly ironic coincidence was it that he had just clumsily tried to hit on the only other mutant in this dump, without knowing that he was one too? 

Before Logan could pretend he hadn't seen what he had seen, Pat said, just loud enough to be heard over the din from the t.v. and the radio, "Gordon, can I speak with you?" 

Fidget seemed relieved, and gulped down his pop, banging the glass down on the bar and rattling the ice cubes like dice. "Well, it was nice meetin' you," Fidget said, getting up and walking off towards Pat. 

Pat was about thirty feet away, standing beside one of the support pillars for the rafters, a thick, square chunk of oak that hadn't aged nearly as well as Pat's desk, but was still structurally sound enough that the roof hadn't collapsed. In spite of all the noise, and the other guys talking all around him, Logan knew he could hear the conversation if he wanted to; there were times when he could concentrate and focus on a single noise, in spite of all other noises, and it was yet another specialized ability he couldn't explain having. 

He didn't want to hear their conversation, though; he really didn't care. And yet still, just like his subconscious had picked  up on a cue he missed, he still heard Pat whisper harshly to Fidget, "I thought I told you last night I didn't want your kind in here." 

Logan wondered if "your kind" referred to homosexual or mutant. Probably mutant - that was considered worse in the grand scheme of things, wasn't it? The religious nutcases would have a field day with Fidget if they got wind of the fact that he was both mutant and gay - two big old taboos rolled up in one. Now if he was also a Satanist, he'd hit their hate trifecta. 

"I'm trying to get out of this entire shitty town," Fidget shot back, anger giving him more confidence than he normally possessed. "There aren't a lot of other places to go, are there?" 

"That ain't my problem - " 

"Hey there - what does a girl have to do to get you to buy her a drink?" A woman said, sliding onto the stool right beside him, and interrupting his eavesdropping. He was slightly annoyed for reasons completely beyond him, but as soon as he saw her, it really didn't matter anymore. 

She was a stunning brunette, with coffee colored eyes and shoulder length hair to match, clad in a tight blue cable knit sweater and jeans worn down to a second skin, and she was the best looking woman he had ever seen in this hellhole. She pushed back a long strand of her hair behind her ear, reveling a gold hoop earring, and he guessed, from some very fine lines that were just starting to form around her eyes, that she was in her thirties. "I don't know," he replied, forgetting all about Fidget and Pat. "What are you offering?" 

She smiled, showing off lips painted so red it looked like she had a bloody mouth. "That's a loaded question, isn't it?" 

"Is it?" She had a highball glass, but it was empty save for a few melting ice cubes. He could smell the rum and Coke from here. He gestured to the terminally sour Benjy, and said, "Touch her up." 

Benjy scowled at him, thinning gunmetal grey hair gleaming like grease in the yellow light, but he gave her a new rum and Coke and Logan dropped a bill on the bar, figuring a little feminine company was worth it, even if she did turn out to be a working girl. 

As soon as he was gone, she swiveled on the stool so her body was leaning towards him, and said, "You were incredible to watch. And taking off your shirt like that ... wow. I'm surprised you don't have groupies." 

"There's a first time for everything." After taking a drink of his beer, and assessing her body language and the scents he was getting off of her - the perfume she was wearing was a bit much; why did women have to wear perfumes? - she was attracted to him, no doubt about that. But how much of it was show? "You know, I'll pay for the drinks, but that's all I'm payin' for." He couldn't think of a more subtle way to say "If you're a hooker, no sale" - that would just have to do. He didn't pay for sex; he didn't have to. He didn't want to sound like some vain, macho asshole, but women - for whatever insane reason - seemed to like him, and he knew he liked them. 

Her brows drew down in confusion, but when she understood his message, her smile mutated into a smirk, and she chuckled. "Aren't you a cheap date. Are you implying that I'm a whore?" 

"No, but ya gotta admit, a  lot of them work this place." 

She nodded, and he knew he could have blown any chance for getting laid tonight right here, but hell, it was better than letting her lead him on and then drop the "One hundred dollars first" on him later. "Get approached a lot?" 

"In the beginning, yeah. Now they all give me dirty looks." 

"Because you won't buy." 

He nodded, and took another swig of his beer. If she was angry or offended, it sure wasn't coming through in her inflections. She looked down at her drink and swirled the ice around for a moment, then asked, "Why not?" 

He studied her face, which was lovely in spite of the slightly excessive make up, and replied, "What kind of answer could I give here that you'd like?" 

Her smile returned, and he knew then she couldn't be a hooker, or at least, if she was, she hadn't been at it long. The true professionals had a hard look behind their eyes, a look that suggested you were nothing but a rutting pig to them, and something, at best, to be pitied. He wondered if any john ever figured out that hookers didn't just hate them, a lot of them felt sorry for them - that you were a sad, pathetic man, and they knew that the second they spotted you. "You're a charmer, aren't you, Wolverine?" 

He always felt strange being called by that name, but it was better to use that as his fighting name - more intimidating. "Logan." 

"Callie," she replied. "And for the record, I'm not." 

He nodded, not bothering to tell her he already figured that out. He stubbed his cigar out in the ashtray, and heard Fidget storm out into the icy night. He heard something small and metallic hit the floor in his wake, and he almost glanced around to see what it was, but Callie's knee brushed his, and it was far from an accident. "Does this mean I'm forgiven for bein' an ass?" He wondered, raising an eyebrow at her. 

Her smile was partially amused, partially sensual, and he knew he was in for a good night. "I don't know. I guess that's going to depend on you, isn't it?" 

Although it was rare, sometimes it wasn't only the guys who got off on those fights. 

They traded pointless banter for a little while longer, and only in retrospect would it occur to Logan that they both had gone out of their way to avoid talking about themselves. She learned virtually nothing about him, and he learned virtually nothing about her - they had both already made up their minds that they wanted to fuck each other, but nothing beyond that. There was no way he was telling her a damn thing about himself, about being a mutant or having no memories beyond being tortured and having an instinct to kill, and he had no idea what she was hiding - a boyfriend, an actual part time hooking job, Callie not being her name, a fight with a significant other that led her to want to revenge fuck a guy, any guy - but honestly he didn't much care. Everyone deserved their secrets. 

Finally she suggested they get out of there, and while he was all for that, he had to warn her he was staying at the "lockers" - it was what they called the cheap and very basic "motel" next door to the bar. It was basically a full service truck stop, so the lockers were tiny and very basic rooms, containing little in the way of space or amenities; it was just a shower, a bed, and a television, a place to throw your crap until you got back out onto the road again. She didn't care, and he was glad. 

As they were leaving, he saw something silver on the floor, and guessed it to be the thing that Fidget had lost on his way out the door. Mostly out of curiosity he picked it up, and discovered it was a hotel room key on a hard blue plastic keychain - no magcards up here in the sticks. It was a cheap motel in what was laughably called a "downtown" area here, but a damn sight better than the lockers. He thought about dropping it on the floor again, but there was an address printed on the keychain's plastic backing, and he figured if he didn't see Fidget fidgeting around here tomorrow before he left, he could just throw it in the mailbox out front before he hit the road. 

The instant he shoved it in his coat pocket, he forgot all about it. 


	2. Part 2

2 

    He got up later than he expected to, but that was Callie's fault. For whatever reason, he didn't have nightmares after sex. It was nice, but it made him sleep in. 

She was long gone - he was peripherally aware of when she left, as he was keeping an ear out, on the off chance she was after his money ( stranger things had happened ). But if she had been, she didn't look for it very hard, and left without incident or trying to take it. He was almost sorry he didn't get her number so he could look her up if he ended up near this shitty burg again. She was a hell of a lot of fun. He liked women who really got into it, who dug their fingernails into his back and bit his ear so hard they nearly broke the skin. It probably made him kinky, but damn that was good. 

At least he had nothing to pack. After a quick shower, he just changed the clothes he wore yesterday for the clothes shoved in his backpack - they looked very much the same, only the flannel shirt was blue plaid as opposed to red, and the t-shirt white as opposed to black. The only difference in the jeans were that these didn't have fresh bloodstains on them. 

He headed out into the icy morning, wondering if spring was ever going to show up. The sky was grey with leaden clouds, the sun nothing more than a sickly glow behind the grey veil, and while new snow had fallen during the night, the foot still on the ground had frozen to concrete consistency - he barely broke through the crust, and he knew damn well how heavy he was. The streets were clear, but every now and again you could see a gleam that indicated ice on the roadway, waiting to cause a spin out for some unlucky son of a bitch. 

It was actually a long walk from here to the "downtown" area, but he didn't care - physical exertion was good for him. Bizarrely, beating the shit out of rednecks in cage fights was actually positive, as it allowed him to burn up some of the free floating aggression that seemed to fill him. He took it out in an "approved" way, and it meant that not only did he get a bit more sleep at night, but less motel beds were turned into shredded wheat. Walking a mile and a half into the town proper, through snow covered fields and down icy slick sidewalks, was almost as good for him, as physical activity of any sort seemed to keep his demons at bay - but the rougher it was, the better, and this wasn't nearly rough enough. 

It didn't matter that it was almost noon - there were virtually no cars on the road, and no one out. Whitewater was probably a ghost town under the best of circumstances, but when sealed off by avalanches and frigid weather, it was like a graveyard. He felt like the only living man on Earth ... and it wasn't a bad feeling. It felt oddly good, in fact. 

The zero degree wind kicked up often, making the warmth on his cheeks and nose almost constant, as the skin was windburned, nearly frostbitten, and his healing abilities kicked in to fix the problem. He sometimes wondered what he'd do without them, but at the same time he wondered if they were more of a curse than anything else. After all, would he have been vivisected if he couldn't have survived it? 

What if they would have anyways? What if it was only perverse happenstance that he survived? 

Down a steep and icy hill, Whitewater looked like an overgrown strip mall gone to seed, full of brick and mortar buildings abused by time, economics, and harsh weather. Half the shops were abandoned, their front windows covered with plywood sheets, half of them marred by "For Sale" signs and anti-Quebecer graffiti. The only places that were open for business was a corner drug store, a grocery store, a cruddy looking diner, a liquor store, a sad bar, and a charity thrift shop - that probably told you everything you needed to know about Whitewater. 

He cut through an alley between a long shut store and the bar, and over the usual smells of piss, vomit, and congealing garbage, he smelled something else as he came out onto the sidewalk. Blood, shit ... death. 

Logan looked around but didn't see the dead body he was expecting. It could have been roadkill, except it didn't smell like an animal - it smelled Human. As he scanned the street, looking for any sign of gore, he heard bells from the drugstore as its glass door opened, disgorging an old woman, wrapped up so tight against the chill that she had a vague resemblance to the Michelin Man. But she headed down the street and around the corner in the opposite direction, never once looking his way. 

He continued, following the scent in the now still air, and found it two alleys down, between two shut buildings. It had a particularly noisome dumpster that hadn't been emptied since last fall and had been used several times as a toilet, but it was sitting askew, one end against the wall and the other partially blocking the alley. 

The blood had frozen into puddles that could have been rusty water if you didn't know better, but there was something else that had oozed from beneath the dumpster that didn't look like Human bits at all. It looked like unbaked dough had been thrown on the pavement, and he crouched down for a better look. 

It smelled even more like Human carnage and waste than before, and before he touched it, he saw the crystallized blood beneath it, the striations that could only be fat and muscle, and realized it was Human skin, with a familiar smell ... 

Fidget. Fidget with the loose and doughy skin. Holy shit. 

He lurched backwards awkwardly before he could touch it, landing on the cold sidewalk with his hands. Glad that there was no one to witness his herky jerky movements, he got up and pretended everything was cool. 

It wasn't, though. Most of Fidget was probably wedged between the brick wall and the dumpster, it was just that some of him oozed out underneath. He wondered what his mutant power was - did his bones turn to jelly or something? Either way, it wasn't enough to save him from this. 

Logan analyzed the smells in the alley, and realized a couple of  things. For the blood to be frozen over, he must have been dead for hours, but the cold had also slowed the process of decay, so his death smelled fresher than it actually was. He could smell a lingering taint of fear - and several other men, including one who had been wearing a rather rancid hair product and one whose deodorant just wasn't cutting it, but no cordite, no gunpowder - not shot. Knifed? It would make a great deal of sense, considering the puddles of blood. 

There was a lingering smell of fresh paint too, fresh spray paint, and it wasn't hard to find why - on the opposite wall was a circle within a circle, a sort of basic cartoon eye in black paint, and underneath was the hastily written word "Purity". 

Obviously a connection. Some guys calling themselves "Purity" had murdered Fidget - or some guys murdered Fidget and then decided to make it look like a group or a cult was responsible. 

He heard the brass bells over the drugstore door sound again, but he didn't bother to look and see who was going in or coming out. Sound traveled well down this block; the brick buildings and narrow street funneled sound towards the end of the block. The bar just a few meters down was open until two in the morning, but with the lax law enforcement and lack of better things to do around here, probably later than that. It was possible Fidget was murdered so quickly he never made a noise, but he doubted it. 

He knew about deaths by stabbing. Using a single knife, it was hard to get an instant killing, silencing blow, unless you were a professional, or unless you cut the throat cleanly. There would have been arterial spray on the walls if his throat had been cut,but there wasn't - the blood was on the ground, mostly pooled where there were low spots and cracks in the pavement. And for some reason, he doubted these guys were professionals - the "Purity" crap, the hastily arranged dumpster to unsuccessfully conceal the body. 

Logan didn't want to think of himself as a professional killer - he wasn't, and even with all he knew, he refused to entertain the idea for even a second; he would not think of himself as an assassin. But ... 

He forced himself to walk away, back towards the bar, where Laurent and the truck he was trying to unload were waiting. He would buy the auto and get the fuck out of here, assuming the roads were open. It was fucking shitty for Fidget, but hey, that was life. 

( Something was bothering him about how he died. Something was very wrong ... ) 

He could still smell death, and checked to make sure he hadn't gotten any of Fidget on his hands or clothes. No, he was clean. 

( ...he was killed this close from a place open virtually all night ... ) 

It was psychosomatic then, or his mind was just focusing on a smell slightly less toxic than the rotting garbage. 

( ... people heard him getting killed. Someone had to have heard him getting killed, and they did nothing. They let it happen, and no one had even reported the body yet ... ) 

Logan paused in front of Delroy's Bar and found himself taking a deep breath, not to clear his nose but to get a grip on a sudden, inexplicable surge of rage that threatened to overwhelm his common sense. 

( ... because he was a dirty mutant freak, and who cared what happened to them. ) 

This was not his problem. He had a hard enough time as it was, running from phantoms and searching for memories that probably didn't exist. It was too bad for Fidget, but shit happened to them all. At least he hadn't been tortured and mutilated. 

( No, he'd been mutilated, all right. Couldn't have been an easy death. He smelled the fear still, didn't he? ) 

He shoved open the door of the bar and walked inside, and was assaulted by the smells of beer, body odor, and cigarette smoke so thick it almost shoved him back out the door. It was perpetual night in here, the windows caked inside with years of smoke and outside with frost, and it was probably for the best that it was hard to see. 

Logan had been hoping the place was bursting with noise, but of course it wasn't - there was a tiny television over the bar, and it was so old and ill used the sound was tinny, and even turned up the noise outside was clearly audible through the thin walls. Maybe it was just his hearing - he did have better hearing than most people. 

( No, they could hear. If something was going on down the street, they could hear. ) 

Despite the early time of day, there were men in here, about a half dozen. They were what he mentally dubbed the "sad grey men", the older career drinkers, and they usually smelled of the secret illnesses that were silently killing them, cancer and emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver. He didn't want to know the smells, he didn't want to know these men were dying of their habits and diseases; he didn't want to feel their instant distrust of a younger stranger in their midst. He just wanted to get the truck and get the fuck out of this town. 

( He should report the body. ) 

"Hey Logan," Laurent said, from his place behind the bar. He was sitting on a stool and reading a newspaper, as all the dedicated early drinkers had their drinks and were watching some talk show on the shitty set. 

"Hey." 

"Got the money?" 

"Why else would I be here?" 

Laurent scoffed. "Yeah, true." He was a young kid, mid-twenties at most, with short but thick reddish-brown hair, and a relatively handsome face. Kind of a professional drifter himself, he had lost most of his Montreal accent by now, but it occasionally surfaced in vowel sounds. "It's around back, the title and other relevant papers in the glove box." 

Logan nodded, and temporarily perched on one of the empty bar stools as he waited for Laurent to wander down his way. He took out his wallet and started counting out the three hundred dollars, stacking it in a neat pile on the bar. 

( He couldn't report Fidget's body. The cops would question him, and might ask for his i.d. which he didn't have. They might think he was being a smart ass when he couldn't even tell them his full name. And what was his alibi for last night? He was fucking a brunette that he only knew as Callie. They might take him in ... and how did he know he wasn't running from them? A regular Human was going to have to find the body - and give a damn. ) 

"Beating the shit out of guys pays well, don't it?" Laurent said, with a wry smile. 

"Better than you might think," he agreed. Even though everything in him was screaming at him to keep his fucking fool mouth shut, he still found himself asking, "Did a weird white haired kid ever come in here?" 

Laurent glanced up at him curiously, looking slightly annoyed at being pulled away from the wondrous sight of the cash. "You mean Gordo? Yeah, sometimes, but he didn't like this place." 

"Who could blame him?" 

"Yeah. Why, did he come by the stop?" 

"The stop" was the imaginative nickname for McQuarrie's, which was what the bar/truck stop/cesspool was actually called. "Last night, yeah. Pat kicked him out." 

"Really? Why?" The question was genuine; he wasn't lying. The pupils of his hazel eyes didn't react, and he smelled no spike of any sort of recognizable emotion. 

Logan shook his head, and slid the pile of money towards Laurent. "Don't really know. He wasn't causin' trouble, so I thought maybe he had a personal thing against him." Mentally, Logan was screaming at himself: "Shut the fuck up! This isn't your business, you didn't even like the fucking kid! Walk away!" 

Laurent frowned, puzzled, before he scooped up the money, not even bothering to hide the avarice in his eyes. But even as he counted the money he got back to the topic at hand. "I don't know. I've only been in this town a few weeks, so I don't know all the stories, but I thought Pat would take money from just about anyone." 

"Gordo live around here?" ( "Shut the fuck up!" ) 

Satisfied, he quickly pocketed the cash, and said, "No - he came in about three days ago, I think, a hitcher on one of the last trucks through. I figured him for a runaway, and maybe a huffer. What accent did he have - sounded Nova Scotian to me." 

"I've heard something like it in Calgary before," he admitted, immediately wishing he hadn't. But he pressed on regardless. "A huffer?" 

"Or some kind of druggie. He always seemed wired, didn't he? I figured maybe he was on meth or some kind of speed." 

But if he had been, Logan knew he'd have been able to smell it. There were biochemical changes to the sweat of a user - he could tell you everyone's addictions simply by smelling them. Such as the sad sack at the end of the bar, casting furtive glances at them - he wasn't just drinking scotch, he'd been hitting the codeine pretty hard. He was asking to die combining depressants and narcotics like that, but hey, who was he to interfere with someone's suicide? God knew he'd tried to kill himself several times already ... "Where'd he get drugs in this town?" 

That made Laurent genuinely chuckle. "Are you nuts? You're staying at the stop, right?" 

"Yeah, but that's typical trucker shit - minor uppers." 

Laurent nodded reluctantly, producing a damp rag he perfunctorily wiped down this end of the bar with. Well, he had to look busy on the off chance someone who mattered came in. "Guess so. I kinda felt bad for him. I told him he could hitch a ride with me once I left, but when he found out I wasn't leavin' for a couple of weeks, he thanked me and turned it down. He was in a blasted hurry to get the fuck outta here, and no, I don't blame him there either." 

"Hey Larry," the sad sack at the end of the bar piped up. "Need a refill." 

"Right there, Chuck," he said, and then, facing Logan so "Chuck" couldn't see, he rolled his eyes and made a disgusted face, mouthing the word "Alchie." 

As he went to top off his Cutty Sark, Logan analyzed what little he knew of Fidget. Desperate to escape, fidgety, so much so that Laurent just assumed he was a speed freak; afraid. 

( "I wish I could fight like you." He had said, smelling of fear. ) 

Oh fuck. Someone was after the kid, and he knew it. He wanted to escape before they caught up to him, but in the end time ran down on him. Purity - Purity caught up with him. What the fuck did that mean? And why didn't he try and get some help? 

Oh, what a stupid question that was. He was a mutant - and maybe some of his obvious anxiousness was just a metabolism problem, part of his mutation ( whatever it was ) that he couldn't quite successfully hide - and who the fuck was going to help him? Mutants were pretty much on their own; your only hope was your mutation could help protect you. Such as make you virtually invulnerable to any injury someone wanted to give you ( ... and have someone equip you with metal claws ... ); whatever Fidget's mutation had been, it hadn't been enough. 

"Can I get you a beer?" Laurent asked, coming back down to his end of the bar. 

Logan shook his head, and slid off the stool. He shouldn't be thinking about this shit; he should be trying to find a way out of town now. There was nothing he could do for Fidget; it was too late. "Nah, just the keys. I gotta get movin'." 

"I hear that." Laurent dug the keys out of the front pocket of his jeans and tossed them to him; Logan easily snatched them out of the air. 

"Thanks. Good luck gettin' out of here." 

"Thanks. You too man. Be cool." 

"Je suis aussi froid que les boules du snowman," he replied, and Laurent burst out laughing. Only when he was halfway out the door did Logan realize he had spoken in French. Whoa. He knew he knew the language but ... shit, how did he slip into it without realizing it? 

There were many things about himself he found creepy - that was one of the top ones. Still, it wasn't as bad as that time he picked up the BBC world news on a radio, and in a speech the Croatian minister was giving to the U.N., he knew what the man was saying before the translator came over the feed and repeated it in English. Up until that point, he thought it was the translator speaking, never realizing he was hearing and understanding Croatian. He would still swear he didn't know the language at all, but he knew that was probably just wishful thinking on his part. He didn't want to know it - he didn't want to know how to fluently speak French, Croatian, German, Spanish, and Cantonese ( all the languages he now knew he spoke, along with English ) any more than he wanted to know how to instantly kill someone. He didn't like the implications. 

He walked around the back of Delroy's, still smelling death in the frigid, dry air, and found Laurent's beaten up white truck easily in the back lot, even though the eight vehicles there were mostly beaten trucks as well. He let himself in the driver's side door and once inside jammed the keys in his pocket, but it was then that he felt another key in his coat pocket. 

He pulled it out, confused, and found himself staring at the fob of the motel key he had picked up last night. 

Oh shit, Fidget had dropped this, hadn't he? It still had his smell on it - he must have. He had completely forgotten he had picked it up. 

He stared at it a moment, wondering what he should do with it. He could toss it out in this lot, throw it into the snow that frosted the edges of the cracked parking lot, let someone else turn it in. That would be the smart thing to do. Of course, the Night Owl Motel was just around the corner ... 

No, no! He couldn't fucking believe he was even thinking about this! Okay, Fidget got himself iced by some assholes, but life was hard and then you got stabbed to death in alley - shit happened! Look at all the shit that had happened to him! And had anyone ever come for him? Had anyone ever even bothered to look for him? As far as Logan could tell, no one had ever missed him - no one even knew he existed. 

( No one was looking for Fidget either ... except of course for the men who killed him ... ) 

Logan slammed the driver's side door and lightly pounded his forehead on the steering wheel so he didn't snap it in half. "Fuck fuck fuck!" He shouted, feeling like punching the door off its hinges. But he just bought the damn thing - he couldn't break it yet. Not until he got out of this shitty little nowhere mountain town. "I am not going to do this," he told himself sternly. "I am not!" 

As soon as he felt he had a handle on his anger, he slammed the keys into the ignition and started the truck. The engine turned over with a reluctant cough that he eventually coaxed into a low but steady growl, and the frost of his breath seemed to add to the white sheet of rime and fog coating the windshield. He would try and find some way out of this goddamn place, even if he had to double back towards Edmonton and find a longer alternate route that would take him into B.C. and the Yukon. 

But the Night Owl was on the way ... 

"Oh, fuck me," he cursed, giving up. Maybe he could salve his sudden conscience and be able to move on without this nagging at him anymore. 

He had enough nightmares as it was. 

3 

    Logan didn't bother to return the key. He simply found room number seventeen and let himself in. 

The room smelled very much of Fidget, meaning the maids hadn't hit this room yet ( thank god - that rose air freshener they used could incapacitate him at thirty paces ) and the manager didn't realize he hadn't checked out yet. Once inside, Logan locked the door behind him, and decided to see if Fidget left behind any clues about the men chasing him. It was too much to hope that they were somehow related to the men that had tortured him, but he had to look. 

The bed was unmade, the coverlet thrown back, the sheets still wrinkled, and his beaten knapsack sat on the threadbare armchair beside the blind covered window. Logan felt funny about looking through someone else's things, but what the fuck had he done for those first few months? He scavenged from other people's things for clothes, for food, for shelter. He read their books and criticized the lack of same, and wondered why finding clothes in his size was such a problem - the men were either too slender or too short ( he had decided he had longer legs than most-he didn't know why, and a broader chest, because that's where the shirts tore first ), too fat or too tall. Apparently he was a mutant in more ways than one. Er, no ... three? Oh fuck, who knew? He wasn't about to count his mutations. 

Logan opened the bag and tipped it upside down, letting the contents spill out on the chair. It was mainly clothes - jeans, t-shirts, sweats - and the normal ancillary things: toiletries, a strand of foil wrapped condoms, a paperback horror novel ( "Misery" - how ironic ) with a dog eared business card as a bookmark, a half empty pack of watermelon bubble gum ( ick! ), and ... a chrome plated knife that seemed to almost get stuck on the bottom of the bag. 

He picked it up, examined it, and flipped it open with an easy flick of the wrist, as if he did this all the time. It was a butterfly knife, and that brought up an interesting question about Fidget. 

Butterfly knives were meant to be opened one handed and in a hurry; they were close quarters fighting knives, but only in the most desperate of situations. The blade folded into the "split" ( butterfly wing style - ergo butterfly knife ) handle, making it easy to carry and conceal, but that made the blade itself as weak as a standard switchblade; it was more for slashing than stabbing, because the blade could easily break off inside a person if you weren't careful. Holding the knife   
    in his hand, he judged it to be a good weight, but the blade was too thin; it looked good, but wouldn't be much good in a real fight. 

There was a trick to butterfly knives too - if you didn't know the right way to open them and hold them, you'd cut the fuck out of your hand, and maybe lose a finger. So Fidget must have known enough about them to open it if not use it, but since it was a low quality blade that must have been where Fidget's knowledge of it ended. 

( And how did he know so much about knives? Just because he had a set in each hand didn't make him an expert. ) 

Fidget probably bought it hot somewhere and learned how to use it, but he never did - the blade was so clean he could have used it to eat with. Logan shoved it in his coat pocket - not that he needed it - because if it was found with Fidget's things someone might think he deserved to get himself killed. And maybe he did, how the fuck did he know? Being a mutant - or a murder victim - didn't make him innocent. 

He crammed everything back into the knapsack, sans knife, and the bookmark fell out as he was shoving the paperback back in. He picked up the card, and saw it was not a standard business one. 

Printed in blood red gothic font on the ivory card was simply the words "Carnivale Outré" and a Calgary area phone number, nothing more.  What the hell was this? He shoved it in his jeans pocket, mainly because he didn't know what else to do with it. 

Logan scanned the room, but wasn't sure what he was looking for. What was he, a fucking detective? He should just leave before he was discovered. 

There was a wastepaper basket in the far corner, near the bathroom, so he went over and had a look, although again he had no idea what the fuck for. There were crumpled pieces of paper from the notepad on the nightstand ( there was no telephone in the room ), and a crumpled up envelope, along with gum wrappers, an empty pop can, and a Snickers wrapper. He pulled out the paper and the envelopes, and laid them on the bed, smoothing them out until they were legible. 

Again, what the fuck was he looking for? A list saying "People who want to kill me"? What he had were aborted letters to parents - he could even put them in order. The first read "Dear Mom and Dad"; the second read "Mom and Dad"; the third read simply "Mom", as he had obviously decided only his mother would read it. That was the only letter with more than an opening line as well. It read, in its entirety : "Mom, This is hard for me to write. I wanted to tell you " and that was it. Tell her what? He was a mutant? He was gay? He was on a hit list and marked for death? Why couldn't he have spit it out before he gave up? 

The envelope was fully addressed to a Deborah Kean, with a Calgary address. Gordon Kean? Was that Fidget's real name? 

He returned the aborted letters to the wastebasket, crumpling them up and tossing them inside. He kept the envelope, though, folding it up and sticking it in his back pocket. He had no idea why - there was no way in fucking hell he was going to tell this woman her son was dead. That was what cops were for. 

There wasn't really anything here. It was just the cheap motel room of a drifter, a person on the run who didn't leave much behind, even when his past caught up to him. And standing there, Logan wondered if this had happened to him. 

Could you just slip through the cracks of life so completely? Could you just disappear one day, like you no longer existed, and have absolutely no one notice? Have no one come looking for you? Could you walk through crowds of people who used to know you, and have none of them recognize you? 

He shook his head, and left Fidget's room, mentally cursing himself. He was not Fidget. Sure, shit happened to him - real bad shit - but again, that was life. And surely someone would care about Fidget, even if it was just his mother. Somebody would notice he was missing; someone would care. 

( But what if they don't? ) 

Logan used his shirt to wipe his prints off the key, and dropped it on the pavement walkway outside his room before heading into the parking lot. The snow was starting to salt down now from the grey sky, tiny white flakes that were more like ash than true snow, and he jammed his hands into his coat pocket to keep them warm as he went to his truck. He felt the cold metal of the knife, and wondered why Fidget didn't have it on him when he was attacked. If he was so afraid, he should have been armed. 

Maybe he was. Maybe he had something else, and the butterfly knife was a back up, a last resort. But whatever it was, it still wasn't good enough to fight the Purity. 

What he fuck was wrong with him? Why did his mind keep fixating on that name ... like he'd heard it before; like it meant something to him. Did it? 

Logan sat in his truck for a long time, trying to decide where recall began, and false hopes ended. 


	3. Part 3

4 

    The truck's radio did work, which was a slight surprise, and it seemed to be on some news station. But it soon became obvious that was the lesser of available evils, as just about the only other thing you could get up here were shitkicker country stations. If he never heard another nasal twang or steel guitar in his life, he'd be happy. 

Logan drove back to the stop, tires sliding slightly on the new layer of ice forming on the roadway, and at first he wasn't sure why he was coming back here - surely the pass wasn't open yet. No, that was a lie, he knew why he was coming back here - Pat knew. Pat knew Fidget was a mutant, and how did he? Pat wasn't the brightest bulb in the drawer - he'd never put together that he was a mutant, even though he never had a bruise after the beatings he allowed the rednecks to give him. So how could he put together that Fidget, whom he almost never saw, was a mutant? 

The answer? He couldn't - someone told him. Someone knew what Fidget was, knew he was a trouble magnet, and warned him. Logan wanted to know who - and Pat was going to tell him, whether he liked it or not. 

In fact, he rather hoped he didn't want to tell him; he hoped he was stubborn and found the courage to not be intimidated by him ... not until he got a chance to soften him up. 

He knew, on one level, he shouldn't be looking forward to hurting someone. And yet he did. He tried not to focus on it, or think about it too much. 

Up here it was genuinely snowing, coming down in fat white flakes, the type they liked to show in greeting cards and Christmas movies, the kinds kids liked to run around and play in. He didn't know if the latter was true or not; there were certainly no kids at the stop to test the theory. 

As he crossed the parking lot, the white carpet of new snow crunched under his feet like pulverized bone, and he could feel the bass of the music playing on the jukebox from out here, hear the treble if he opened up his hearing just a bit. It was more of the shitkicker stuff. Goddamn it, he hated truck stops. 

Once inside, it didn't take him long to find Pat. He was speaking to Arnie - the first shift bartender - at the bar, and shut up as soon as he saw him, giving him a curious look. "I ain't here for the fights," he said, coming up to them, ignoring Arnie's evil look - Arnie never liked him, for whatever reason. 

Pat tried to pretend he was relieved, but failed. "What can I do for you then, Logan?" 

"In your office." Logan jerked his head in the appropriate direction. 

He looked understandably wary. "Is there a problem?" 

"Somethin' happened last night, and I don't think you want me discussin' it around all these people." Logan didn't wait for his response, he simply started heading towards his office, sure he wasn't about to let him be alone with the lockbox full of cash in his third desk drawer. 

He was right. By the time he reached the door, Pat was hot on his heels. "Look, Logan, I know it's shitty about the fights - " 

"I told you it ain't about that." He entered his office, crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Pat until he came inside and shut the door. 

"So what is this about?" He was trying to play it casual and cool, but Logan could smell the start of nervous sweat just beginning to ooze from his pores. He went behind his desk, taking a protective, defensive position. Shit, he was still scared of him. 

"That white haired kid who came in last night - why'd you kick him out? He wasn't causin' trouble." 

Pat looked baffled, deciding to shoot for ignorance. "Who?" 

Logan leaned against the door, making it perfectly clear that if he ever expected to leave this room, he was going to tell him what he wanted to know. "You know damn well who I mean - you called him Gordon, right? What was that about?" 

Pat tried to stare him down, but almost immediately gave up. He pretended to look for something in the mess of off track betting racing forms on his desk. "How did you hear that, exactly?" 

"Neither of you ever learned how to whisper." Well, close enough - he didn't really need to know more. 

If Pat thought he was lying, he was never going to call him on it. Chicken shit. "Look, I got fights to set up. Why don't you find the kid and ask him?" 

"I've tried; I can't. It's like he dropped off the face of the earth." Unlike most other people, Logan knew he was a good liar when he wanted to be; he could modulate his own physical responses, and he was never afraid of what would happen if he got caught in one. After all, he had to lie to survive. He knew it was possible this made him a complete sociopath, but that was another thing he didn't like to think about. 

And there it was - a twitch in his right eyelid that was too subtle to be a wince, but more like a nervous tic. Why the nerves? Were innocent men this nervous? "He prob'ly got a lift outta here - " 

"With the pass closed?" 

"He could've taken the main highway out." 

"If he wanted to head back towards civilization. But he was terrified of civilization, and you know why, don't you, Pat?" 

That made him glance up sharply, grey eyes narrowing in suspicion, trying to bluff his way past his own fear. "I have no idea what the fuck you're on about, Logan. What the fuck was he? A friend of yours?" 

"Like I have friends," he replied tartly. Well, he knew Pat would have brought it up eventually if he hadn't. "You said you didn't want his kind in here. What "kind' was that?" 

"He was dealing drugs. I - " 

"Try again." 

Pat stared at him, and in spite of his fear, he was getting genuinely angry now; cornered animals often did. "What the fuck is this to you, Wolverine?" 

Logan smirked at him, amused at his use of his fighting name. What response did he think he'd get from that? Shame? He should have known by now he had no shame - that part of him was missing too. "Why did you throw him out, Pat?" 

He scoffed, and once again fell to hiding behind a wall of emotion to obscure his duplicity. "He was a fag. If I let him hang around, he'd have gotten himself killed anyways." 

What an interesting choice of phrase. "You're still lying." 

"Oh, you think so? If one of those interstate truckers even suspected he was fag, he'd end up - " 

"Just cut the bullshit," he growled. Until this moment, he never realized that hearing someone referred to as a 'fag' bothered him. Maybe once you'd been called a "mutie", all slurs hurt. "Who told you about him? I want a name." 

Pat went back to being startled, but it was only partially an act. He was just now starting to realize he might not be able to talk his way out of this. "What? What are you talking about?" 

Logan stalked towards the desk, moving with the same slow deliberateness he used in the ring when closing in on an injured opponent, and he knew it wasn't lost on Pat. He lowered his head, tensed his shoulders, and looked at Pat while keeping the rest of his face down - a predatory posture, one of imminent attack. But he kept his hands hanging loose at his sides, not fists - not yet. He couldn't give in completely to his rage, because he might not get his answers. 

Pat backed up a step, making his chair scrape against the floor until it hit the wall. "L-look, Logan, I don't know what you want from me," he said, a nervous tremor in his voice. He understood he was in for it now; his fear stank like vinegar. 

"I want the name of the man who told you Gordon was a mutant," he said, quietly, calmly. He felt like he was two seconds away from exploding again, and he was fighting to stay in control. Pat had no idea how dangerous he could be - his anger was often bigger and stronger than he was, a beast he couldn't hope to tame. Sometimes he was just dragged along for the ride. 

Pat's eyes flicked to a desk drawer, and Logan warned him, "A gun won't help you." 

He must have guessed right, as Pat's eyes widened until they almost bulged, and he backed up to the wall himself now, the back of his legs banging into the chair and sending it sliding aside on its casters. "Oh my god," he gasped, sounding like he was on the verge of hyperventilating. "You're one of them, aren't you? " 

One of them. Oh, what a lovely phrase that was. One of them, spat with so much venom - one of the trash, one of the muties, one of the freaks. Logan vaulted over the desk one handed, landing on his feet in front of Pat and never losing eye contact with him. This freaked him out so much Logan could hear his heart beating from here, a desperate thud thud thud of someone with too much adrenaline dumping into their system at once, a heart not quite built to take this much stress. "I want an answer," he growled in response, his voice little more than a rumble in his throat. He wanted to pick Pat up by his scrawny neck and squeeze it until his head popped off like a cap on a bottle - Logan had a feeling he could actually do that. 

Pat was clearly desperate to get out of this; he'd probably never been this scared in his life. "I have money - " 

"I don't want your fucking money," he spat, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him so hard against the wall his head bounced off it, and a small framed dollar bill ( his first? ) fell off the far wall and crashed to the floor, the glass shattering on impact. 

He didn't get it, did he? None of them got it. He could take their fucking money whenever he wanted; he could take anything and everything they owned whenever he felt like it. But he didn't. He didn't know why he didn't - he didn't think it was anything as prosaic as conscience or guilt - but he could own them all. The bottom line was, he didn't want to. He wanted nothing to do with people and their fucked up world. He was only peripherally in it because he had to be; there was no other reason. "I want the name," he snarled, his face inches from Pat's. It was hard not wince at the reek of fear coming off of him now; it was pungent enough to make his eyes water. 

"They'll kill me," Pat gasped, almost sobbing. 

"Either them or me," he replied coldly, slamming him back against the wall one more time for emphasis. "Die now or die later - your choice." 

Pat swallowed hard, and tried to call up his last reserves of courage. "I'll call the police. You won't be safe in this town - " 

Logan growled, a noise that was as derisive as it was angry, and said, "Call them. Do you think they can hold me? Do you think they can even slow me down? Call them. And once I'm through with them, I'm coming back for you." 

Pat was shaking now, trying not to cry, a single muscular contraction away from pissing himself. He looked like the sad old man he was, and Logan felt an inexplicable twist of guilt in his stomach for bullying someone so obviously weak. But he made this bed - he deserved the consequences. "Branson," Pat stammered, tears leaking from his rheumy eyes. "Roger Branson." 

The name was vaguely familiar, but it took Logan a moment to figure out where he'd heard it before. A customer, yes, but also ... "Fuck," Logan cursed, and slammed his forehead into Pat's. His eyes rolled up inside his head, and Logan let him go so his body could collapse to the floor like the sack of shit it was. 

He should have known. It made the most sense, didn't it? 

Roger Branson. The man who looked the other way as far as the illegal fighting and betting going on at the stop went. 

The cop. The police chief of Whitewater. 

Oh holy shit. 

5 

    Whitewater was too small to have a police unit proper, so what it had was basically seven cops that worked as the law for Whitewater and three of the smaller burgs buried in the mountains nearby. There was virtually no crime, so seven seemed like overkill, but they handled a lot of car wrecks out here, and petty crimes like public drunkenness and the occasional brawl. 

But if they were corrupt, you were pretty much fucked. 

What Logan didn't understand was who told Branson. He couldn't have known right away, or Fidget would have been dead the second he set foot in this town. So someone informed him, and he took care of the "problem". 

It made the sloppy crime scene instantly suspect. Guns would have drawn attention, so they used knives, but they didn't use them well - because they wanted him to suffer? Because they wanted ... they wanted information out of Fidget? And why would cops be suspected if the crime scene looked so fucking amateur? 

It wasn't hard to find out where Branson lived - all he had to do was call information. Why would he have an unlisted address or phone number out here? What did he have to be afraid of? He was the law around these parts - people were supposed to be afraid of him. 

But Logan wasn't. Why should he be afraid of the bastard? It wasn't like he had anything to lose. 

Whitewater was too small to technically have a good side of town, but there was a house set apart from all the others, on three acres of land now covered with snow, and with a mountain so close it looked like it was in their backyard. The house was a large three story structure with lots of wood shingles and a dramatically peaked Alpine style roof - it looked like it may have once been a ski lodge. 

Up the long drive, which had been cleared of snow, he saw a a four wheel drive truck and a big, shiny new SUV parked beneath a protective carport- the truck still had snow on it, so it must have been out recently; the SUV was clean, suggesting it hadn't. He wondered which one belonged to Branson. 

He walked up the freshly shoveled stone steps to the front door, which had a stained glass window inset at the top. He remembered they were called transoms, but he had no idea why he knew that. He shook his head at his own curious mind and knocked on the door, not looking for a doorbell. Frankly, he could just walk in the door - locked or not - but he could smell at least one woman, and had no interest in terrorizing his family. He just wanted Branson. 

Did one of the women smell familiar? 

He heard female voices coming down the hall, one of them laughing, but he heard only one set of footsteps coming towards the door. When it opened, he found himself looking at a tall, elegant but matronly looking woman. She was in her late forties or early fifties, with a tidy halo of tightly curled blondish brown hair, and clear blue eyes that gazed at him with a sort of haughty suspicion, as if he could just barely be of interest to her. She wore a loose brown sweater and tan slacks that didn't quite hide her slender, stick like figure. He definitely preferred women with a few more curves. "Can I help you?" The woman he assumed was Branson's wife said, studiously polite but frigidly cold. 

"Is Roger home?" He asked, pretending familiarity. It was more likely to get a positive response. 

She studied him curiously, obviously trying to figure out how he knew her husband. "No, he's out on call. Is there something I can do for you?" 

Logan shook his head. Maybe it was time to call the police on himself. "No, I'll catch up to him - " 

"Thanks, Diane," a woman said, coming up behind her, slipping on her down jacket. "I needed to - " She stopped in her tracks when she saw him standing on the doorstep, and even he paused, surprised. The woman did smell familiar. 

It was Callie. 

He recovered more quickly than she did, looking back at the woman who must have been Diane. " - later. Thanks." He then looked back at Callie and gave her a polite nod." Ma'am." He didn't wait for her response, he simply turned and left, walking down to the carport, where he knew they'd be unable to see him. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaned against the truck ( which must have been Callie's ), and waited for her to join him. 

How coincidental. Callie being here, at the house of Branson. He was starting to wonder how much of this was coincidence, and how much of this was set up. 

He heard her say her goodbyes to Diane, who asked, "Did you know him?" 

"No, I just ... for a second, I thought he was someone else." The hesitation was so obvious, he was surprised Diane didn't call her on it. 

He heard her steps as she approached, and they slowed as she must have guessed he was waiting for her. "Are you following me?" She asked, her voice small and strangely defeated. 

He gave her an odd look for that - what a weird question. But as she made her way to her truck, Callie was studiously avoiding looking at him; she pretended to be more interested in searching her key ring. Her black down coat was way too large for her; she was swallowed by it, rendered both shapeless and oddly young, like a  little girl wearing her daddy's coat. Her long dark hair veiled her face, so he couldn't see her expression. "No, of course not. Did you set me up?" 

Finally she looked up at him sharply, shocked and confused. "What? What are you talking about?" He noticed she was now wearing a ring on her left hand - a wedding ring. So that's what she was hiding. 

She wasn't lying, as far as he could tell, but she was scared. "How do you know Branson?" 

She blinked rapidly, brown eyes wide, and he knew she was torn between rage and tears. Her eyes had a tilt that suggested some Inuit blood in her family; maybe that's why she had such a lovely face. "How do you?" She snapped back, settling on anger. 

"I don't." He had to tread very carefully here - he didn't dare reveal too much until he knew what her role was in all of this. "Something happened to a ... friend of mine, and I think he knows something about it. Your turn." 

She glanced back down at the clean cement carport, and briefly fumbled with her keys again. They jingled like chains. "Get in the car," she said, that strangely defeated tone back in her voice. "I don't want Diane hearing this." 

To trust or not to trust - such a weird conundrum. And things were made even more awkward by the circumstances. They knew each other's bodies, but otherwise knew absolutely nothing about each other - intimacy with a huge chasm of mystery. Still, when she unlocked the passenger side door, he waited until she walked around to the driver's side before he got in. 

The leather seats were comfortable, the interior was scrupulously neat, and smelled very faintly of a man. A man who smoked, who had something to do with gun oil, and man ... who used an odd smelling hair product. Hadn't he smelled that in the alley where he found Fidget? 

As soon as she got in and slammed the door, he said, "He's a cop." 

"Roger?" 

"Your husband." 

She looked at the steering wheel, tears welling in her eyes. "He is. I thought you were leaving town." 

"I'm tryin', but things keep gettin' in the way." He studied her profile, the dejectedness of her posture, and realized she seemed much older than she actually was, as if life had beaten her down so much she had almost no fight left in her; a complete one eighty from the sexy, confident woman he met in the bar. He guessed she wasn't a cop, just a cop's wife, but that begged the question why was she at the stop, looking for a one night stand? That was pretty fucking dangerous, wasn't it? 

Yes, it was. That was the point. "He was out that night, wasn't he? You knew he wouldn't come by Mc Quarrie's, so he wouldn't run into you." 

"I don't want to talk about this," she said, a tear trailing down her cheek. "I'm sorry, okay? I drank too much, it was a mistake - " 

"You weren't drunk," he replied, not rubbing it in, just pointing it out. There was a special smell for the intoxicated too, and she wasn't. Two rum and Cokes had been enough to make her happy, but not out of her mind. 

She looked at him, eyes shining with tears. "Is that an accusation?" 

"No. Look, I don't care, Callie - I'm not out to fuck up your life." 

She scoffed and looked away, shaking her head. "Why not? Everyone else is." 

Her hair slid aside from her throat, and he saw some red marks on the side of her neck. They were shaped like thick fingers, and were back far enough that they could pretty much only be seen from this angle. Now pieces started to click into place. Some people drank, some did drugs, but those weren't the only self-destructive behaviors, were they? "He hurts you." An observation, not a question. And he hated this man - whoever he was - just for being on the scene of Fidget's murder. God, this cocksucker was asking to get beaten until he didn't even resemble a human being anymore. Which was only right, because he was a poor excuse for one. 

And Logan felt sick, because he realized now why she seemed so submissive when she came out to the carport - he was a man, and she was expecting him to get violent with her, to beat her. And she thought a posture of immediate surrender would lessen the severity of it. 

He didn't know how hard done by she had been in her life, and he didn't want to know, as god knew he had enough shit he was dealing with. But he was furious on her behalf, just like he was furious on Fidget's behalf. But why? Didn't he have enough shit he was dealing with? He didn't need to take on other people's problems. 

But he hated bullies; he loathed them instinctively, like it was a purely atavistic response. Anyone who would target someone they knew was weaker than they were deserved to have their balls kicked up into their chest cavity. They wanted to beat on a kid, a woman? Fine - he wanted them to try and beat on him. Take on a man for once. 

"He was out with the boys," Callie said, seemingly apropos of nothing. She had turned away from him completely, as if checking the side mirror for anyone who might be sneaking up behind them. Maybe she was. And while she was trying desperately to hold back the tears, they were still falling, no matter how quickly she wiped them away. "I knew he wouldn't be home until dawn, and ... I didn't really want to be there." 

"Be where?" 

"Home." She sniffed, swallowed hard. " I just wanted to feel something." 

It disturbed him that he could understand that completely. "Do you know where he was that night?" 

She shrugged a single shoulder, shook her head."Delroy's probably. I don't know." 

Right at the crime scene. Bastards. But then again, a man who would beat a woman was capable of absolutely anything - murder was not a huge logical leap, just a tiny side step. "Have you tried to get away?" 

That made her laugh, but it was bitter, and when she looked at him, her eyes were hard with anger even though they still glistened with tears. "Where the fuck am I gonna go, Logan? He's a cop." 

He had a feeling she had tried to escape before, but almost didn't survive it. Maybe she would have preferred not to have. Maybe that's why she played Russian roulette by sleeping with strange men, any one of which could turn out to be a psychopath who would kill her and leave her dumped on a roadside - assuming her psycho hubby didn't find out about her fucking around and kill her first. But hey, that would solve the problem of being trapped in an abusive marriage, wouldn't it? God, he hated humanity - he really did. "Is your husband home?" 

That question seemed to startle her, make her posture stiffen. "If he was, do you think I'd have been able to go out?" 

He assumed that meant he was obsessively controlling. If he knew beyond a doubt that she had fucked around on him, she'd be as dead as Fidget. "Take me there. Quickly pack a bag, and hit the road. When he comes home, he'll find me waiting for him. You won't have to worry about him anymore." 

She stared at him in shock, tears falling from her eyes due to the influence of gravity. "What? What are you saying?" 

"I'm pretty sure he's one of the guys that killed my friend. I want to have a talk with him, and I don't want you there." 

"Killed? I thought you implied hurt." 

"I lied." 

She looked out the windshield, tears welling in her eyes once more, and she covered her mouth with her hand, as if afraid she might scream or vomit. "I always thought he'd kill me," she said, her voice breaking in a sob. But she fought to get it under control, and he admired her for that. 

"He won't get the chance." 

She swallowed hard and seemed to get her emotions under control, but she still didn't look at him directly. "Are you going to kill him?" Her voice had no strength at all, as if he had just gut punched her, but all he heard was fear - whether it was for him, herself, or her abusive husband he had no idea. 

"I don't know," he admitted. "But I promise you he won't be coming after you. He won't bother you ever again." 

"How can you promise me that?" 

"To get to you he'll have to get through me. He can't." 

Now she did look at him, and her eyes had a stark fear in them. He understood now she was afraid for him. "He's a cop." 

"So? He's just a man." 

"And you're not?" 

What did he have to lose? "No. I'm more than that." 

For a long time, she stared at him, her dark eyes boring into his, and when she decided not only what exactly he was saying but also that he was telling the truth, her eyes widened slightly, causing a few stray tears to leak out. She looked away again, shaking so hard he was afraid she was having a seizure, and she paled so dramatically he was sure she was going to vomit or pass out. Was it being alone in a car with a mutant, or the realization that she fucked a mutie last night, or both? 

They sat in silence for a long time, although it wasn't as awkward as it had been when they first started talking, and he listened to the soft plop of snowflakes falling to the ground outside. Normal people didn't hear that, did they? 

She was still shaking, although her color was better as she moved the keys towards the ignition. They slipped from her trembling hand, but he caught them before they could hit the floorboards. She looked briefly startled, but then said, "Some reflexes you have there." 

He just shrugged. What could he say? They came in handy. 

She plucked the keys from his hand and managed to get them in the ignition this time. She seemed to be barely trembling anymore. She turned the engine over and let it warm up a minute, then said quietly, "Make him hurt." 

"Darlin'," he reassured her. "That's a given." 

6 

    Callie - who admitted her name was actually Alisha - drove them to their little split level house that probably constituted a "suburb" in an area as small as this. It was only three miles down the road from the Branson place, and a quarter mile from its nearest neighbor - a lot of bad shit could go down here, and no one would hear it. 

Good. 

While she threw some things together, he stood to one side of the curtains beside the bay window in their living room, which gave a wonderfully unobstructed view of the road, their small gravel driveway, and their snow covered front lawn. There was no way he was getting with fifty feet of this place without him knowing about it first. He just hoped that she was long gone before he showed his cowardly, mutant hating face. 

It turned out she was quite eager to leave. She had a bag packed in under ten minutes, and she seemed almost flushed with the speed of it, fear still oozing out of every pore. But she wasn't crying anymore - she had given that up just as they left the Branson place. "He has lots of guns," she warned him, coming into the living room. She carried only a single suitcase with her, and his respect for her increased a notch. There was rarely if ever any object worth dying for - she could always buy what she had to leave behind. 

He nodded, not at all surprised. "I smelled the gun oil." 

She raised an eyebrow at that, but went on. "There's one in a locked drawer in the nightstand, one in the upper shelf of the closet, another he hides in the living room -" 

"I'll find 'em, don't worry." 

"Should I ask how?" 

He shook his head, because he didn't really think she wanted to know. "Doesn't matter. Bullets don't do much to me anyways." 

Now that really surprised her. "They don't?" 

"Well,they sting. Trust me, he's got nothing that can drop me." Unlike Fidget. He hoped he was expecting to battle another Fidget - and he was looking forward to fuckface ( according to Alisha, his name was David Farris ) pulling a knife on him. 

She considered that a moment, and he smelled the slightest decrease in her fear. "So I guess asking if you're sure you'll be okay is idiotic." 

"I'm always okay," he told her, kind of touched that she gave a damn. It wasn't like they actually knew each other, nonetheless meant anything to each other. They were still just strangers who slept together once. Well, technically twice, if you wanted to be nitpicky, but all in the same night. 

She nodded, and came up to him on her way to the door. He was expecting a kiss, but not quite the passionate one he received. She kept her warm hand on the back of his neck even as she pulled away, and looked him straight in the eyes when she asked, "Why?" 

Why help her or why do this? They were both damn good questions. "Because I have to," he said, surprising even himself. Well, someone had to do something, and if everyone else was too stupid or too afraid, it fell to him, didn't it? 

Fidget would get no justice. Whatever he died for would be swept under the carpet, because it was corrupt cops that killed him. And Logan would never find out what "Purity" meant, and he wasn't about to stand for that. He would know what it meant, and why killing Fidget because of it was so important, even if he had to go through every cop in this goddamn town, one by one. 

Now that sounded like a fun evening. 

She slid her hand down his neck, down the front of his chest, and finally let it fall to her side. He was sorry there wasn't more time, because whatever sexual chemistry they had was still present, and he could hardly deny that he still wanted her. But there was no time, and it wouldn't be right anyways; sex was a fun way to kill the pain, but getting away from the source of the pain was a hell of a lot better. 

She looked like she wanted to say something but she didn't know what, and ultimately she just gave up. But as she went to the front door, he told her, "Don't live in fear. There's nothing worse than that." And he knew that from personal experience. 

She paused in the doorway, letting in the chill air from outside, and after a long moment, she looked at him, and said, "For the record, you're the best fuck I've ever had." 

He couldn't help but smile at that. She really knew the right way to compliment a guy. "You weren't too bad either." But that wasn't much of a compliment to a woman, was it? "Take care of yourself. And don't let anyone treat you like shit again." 

She gave him a heartbreakingly sad smile. "I won't. Kick his ass." 

"You bet." 

Alisha left, glancing back once at the house and giving him a small farewell wave as she drove away, leaving this place behind for good. She was headed towards the main highway, back towards civilization, so the fact that the pass was still blocked didn't matter to her. For the moment it had stopped snowing too, so it was possible she could get half way to Edmonton before the roads backed up. 

His stomach rumbled, reminding him he was hungry - when was the last time he ate anyways? - so he decided to go make himself something before David came home for the beating of his life. 

They had a nice little home here, so neat and tastefully appointed it could have been a showroom, but that was probably the first clue something was drastically wrong. Unless people weren't staying in a place - like it was one of those seasonal cabins he used to camp out in when he was completely out of his fucking mind - a place should look lived in. The fact that this place was cleaner than most surgical prep rooms was a disturbing hint of a compulsion, or a mentally ill person who craved such a high degree of order they were bound to be disappointed. And since David was a control freak, that tracked. 


	4. Part 4

What he wanted to know was what genius thought it was a good idea to give this psycho a badge and a gun. But then Branson himself probably wasn't Mr. Stability, was he? Well, it was possible he was - mentally sound but rotten to the core. It happened, and even though he had almost no memories at all, Logan still felt like he'd seen it all before. 

Hey, he wasn't all that mentally stable himself. But at least that made them almost even. 

He found a bottle of Moosehead in the well stocked fridge, as well as quite a bit of food to chose from. He made himself a roast beef sandwich, thrilled to see they had brown mustard, and in honor of David's anal retentive tendencies, he made a complete fucking mess, and didn't bother to clean anything up. He left his hearing open so he could hear if David came up the drive, but he wasn't concerned either way - he wasn't going to be much of a fight. 

While eating his sandwich, he walked around their frighteningly neat house and found all the guns. Mostly Glocks and Berettas - no hunting weapons here, unless it was the human variety - he collected all the ammo and the clips, and dry fired them at the floor before putting them back, just to make sure no bullets were in the chamber. The guns wouldn't be any good to David without bullets, and he didn't think he'd be rushing out to buy any more ammo at this point. 

He went to the back of the house, where a sliding glass door opened on a porch now ankle deep in snow, and threw the ammunition out as far as he could. It landed somewhere in the backyard, disappearing instantly into the blanket of snow. He'd probably find it during the spring thaw, but that was assuming he was (A) alive and (B) here for it. 

Logan realized he should have made two sandwiches, as he was still hungry. So when he retrieved his beer he got an apple out of the crisper, and ate it on the way back to the living room. What was it with store bought apples? They always tasted like they were made of cardboard and paste; they didn't taste anything like a real apple. Wait - when did he have a "real" apple? 

Oh hell - sometimes he sounded like a cranky old man. And he wasn't old ... was he? Oh, what the fuck did it matter? 

He finished off the beer, and had decided to get another one and maybe watch a bit of the boob tube when he heard car tires crunching up the gravel driveway. Lovely - hubby was home. He hoped he wasn't expecting a welcome home kiss. 

Logan went to the kitchen and toss the beer bottle in a bag under the sink, where there were sacks for recycling cans and glass, and he heard David come in the door. "Alisha," he barked. 

"She had to go," Logan replied, coming out of the kitchen to meet him. David was tall and sturdily built, broad shouldered with just the hint of nascent beer gut, a reasonably good looking guy with a square "Dudley Do-Right" kind of jaw and brown hair cut severely short. It was almost more of a military cut than a cop one, and made him look even more intimidating, which may have been the point. He wasn't wearing an actual uniform but a sort of faux one - black slacks, white shirt, and navy blazer all submerged beneath an authentic police issue navy parka, and he had the cap, coated in snow and rain proof plastic. He had over a foot and a hundred pounds on Alisha - she probably had no chance at all against him. "I mean, seriously, she had to book. Wouldn't you?" 

David stared at him in shock, his mean little blue eyes growing even harder at the site of him, and his hand instantly fell to the bulge on his hip that could only be a holstered gun. "Who the fuck are you?" 

"A friend of hers. God knows she needed one." 

His eyes narrowed to slits, and his facial features hardened until it looked like he was wearing a mask made of stone. "What the fuck are you taking about? Where is she?" 

"I told you - gone." 

He sneered, revealing tiny, perfectly white teeth. "What the fuck are you, her boyfriend?" 

Logan smiled, not quite laughing. "No, we never managed to have that proper date." 

David pulled his service revolver, and slammed the door behind him. "Where is she, fuckface?" 

"Now now, Constable, there's no reason for that," he said, letting his hands hang loose at his sides. He felt perfectly relaxed, perfectly at ease - and ready to spring on him any second. He was in no rush, though. He was the cat, and David, whether he knew it or not, was the tiniest mouse he had ever seen. "What exactly is Purity?" 

He had been stalking menacingly towards him, gun first, but that made him pause, cocking his head to one side. He studied him like something he just found floating in his beer. "What?" 

"Purity. Who are they?" 

David took a long moment to process that, and Logan could almost hear the wheels in his Neanderthal brain creaking as they tried to work. He raised the gun - a Beretta .45 - and leveled it with his face. "You have until the count of three to tell me where she is, and what you're doing here. One." 

Logan couldn't help but smirk. "First, tell me why you murdered Gordon Kean." 

By the time David's finger tensed on the trigger, Logan was moving. 

He ducked low and to the side as he launched himself forward in an open tackle, and felt the wind of the bullet pass by his head a second before his shoulder buried itself in David's midsection. He slammed him back up against the door, and David's breath left him in a big "oof" as Logan reached up, grabbed the wrist of his gun hand, and a gave it a single sharp twist. 

The bones cracked like glass, and he screamed as the gun fell from his useless hand. Logan drove a knee hard into his gut, just to shut him the fuck up. As he backed off, David fell to his knees on the linoleum floor of the foyer, trying not to retch. While he coughed up bile and the protein bar he had for breakfast, Logan grabbed the Beretta, took out its ammo, and tossed the empty gun into the living room. He went back into the kitchen to dump the bullets into the sink - they rang when they hit the porcelain, like falling pennies. "You're not dealing with a woman you've beaten down for years, or a teenage boy who can barely control his powers, Constable. Do you mind if I call you Dave? You're in a shitload of trouble - I hope you realize that." 

"You stupid motherfucker," David said, between coughs. He was finished throwing up, but still seemed to be struggling with the pain. "You have no idea who you're fucking with." 

"Oh no, I know exactly who I'm fucking with - a murdering, wife beating prick." 

He looked up at him, a glistening strand of saliva dangling from his lower lip. "I'm gonna jam your own balls down your throat before you die, you motherfucking son of a bitch." 

Logan couldn't help but chuckle. "That's very creative. Also, impossible, but hey, who am I to burst your bubble?" 

"You killed her 'cause of that fucking gene trash, is that it?" 

For a moment, that threw him. What the fuck was the prick on about? Then he put it together. "Oh, you think I killed Alisha." 

"What have you done to her?" The funny thing was, Logan knew he was furious not because he thought he hurt her, but because he took away one of his possessions. His prized toy, in fact. 

"I don't think you want to know what I did to her," he admitted, smiling at his own joke and his own memories. But rather than explain that, he got back on topic. "No - unlike you, I'd never hurt her. She's gone as in gone, man - vamoosed, flown, ran off, dumped your sorry ass. Stick a fork in your shitty excuse for a marriage, 'cause it's done. And so are you." 

He glared at him in pained and angry disbelief. "Lisha wouldn't leave me." 

"You mean she wouldn't dare 'cause of the power you have over her? Sorry to disappoint you, but your power's gone. You're my bitch now." He was enjoying this way too much, he knew it, and yet he had no desire to stop himself. He hadn't had this much fun in ... well, ever. 

David's look turned acrid, and his face flushed like he'd been windburned. No warden liked to have their prisoner taken away, and then get told it was their turn in the cell. "Are you one of his freako friends, is that it?" 

"Who? Gordon's? No, I didn't know him at all. But I doubt he did anything to warrant gettin' sliced up like a pot roast and left in an alley to die. And what's with all this 'Purity" shit? What did he know about it that got him killed?" 

But David was sneering at him as he struggled to his feet, trying not to aggravate his broken right wrist. "Suck my dick.I ain't tellin' you a fuckin' thing, freak. " 

Logan snickered, enjoying this in the worst way possible. Boneheaded defiance! How he so loved pointless displays of macho behavior. "You're gonna tell me what I want to know, David. The only control you have over this situation is how much you're going to suffer." 

As he was struggling to stand, Logan saw David's left hand fall towards his ankle, and knew what it meant. As he brought up his hand, now holding the pistol he pulled from his ankle holster, Logan was right there to rip it out of his hand and smash the side of his head into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He could have hit him harder - he could have put his head completely through the wall, cracked his skull like an eggshell, but that would be too kind to this fuck. Death was too good for him - especially if it was quick. 

He sagged as if he might collapse, but he fell back against the door and managed to stay on his feet, although he looked barely conscious. Blood trickled down his face from a minor cut across his forehead, and he glared at him with glassy eyes as Logan emptied the ammo from the small gun - really just a better quality "Saturday Night special", with five shots to its name - and then threw the gun into the living room with his other useless piece. He tossed the bullets over his shoulder like a handful of spilled salt, and they hit the linoleum of the kitchen floor like dimes. "Are you startin' to get the picture here David, or do I have to break out the hand puppets?" 

Farris was as stubborn as he was stupid, and launched himself at Logan. But he was slow due to his injuries, and Logan had been expecting it anyways, so he sidestepped his clumsy roundhouse and punched him hard in the stomach as David stumbled past, then gave him a hard shove to the back that sent him crashing violently to the floor. He screamed in pain as his right hand got caught between his muscular body and the linoleum, but it died in a choking sound as David coughed up some blood. 

Logan had barely pulled that punch to his stomach. If he was in the ring, he'd have pulled it completely, and while he knew he was going easy on the guys, the guys would have felt it as a normal but hard punch. But he had a lot of adamantium in his fist; if he put all his strength into a punch, he could rupture any organ he desired, break any bone. He hadn't pulped David's kidney or ruptured his spleen, but he knew he'd done some damage, most likely to his stomach walls, perhaps bruised an intestine. Now that was fucking painful, and not normally lethal ... well, not right away, at any rate. "I can break every bone in your body," he told him matter of factly, with no malice. If he really  let all his hate out, he'd lose control of his temper, and the guy would be too dead to give him any answers. "In fact, I could rip your limbs off." This stupid fuck didn't know how lucky he was - he hadn't seen his claws yet. He only popped his claws when he needed to, or he decided to use them. He was very close to doing so now. "I could do what you did to that kid. Only I can make the agony last even longer." 

"F-fuck you," he stammered, curling into a fetal position, arms around his stomach. There was a mere splotch of blood on the marble patterned floor, but his mouth was now bright red with it, and it streaked his chin, hiding the strands of saliva and vomit. Logan could smell fear coming off of him now, as it was finally sinking in that the "freak" in his kitchen was not Alisha, nor was he Fidget. See, they were probably good people. 

Logan knew he wasn't good people. 

He rather hoped he wasn't in Farris's league of slime, but if he was honest with himself, he knew he was closer to him than to either Alisha or Gordon. And that realization pissed him off so much he wanted to kick Farris around like a soccer ball just to burn off some of that self-loathing. But he couldn't kill him; he needed him to talk. 

How much pain could he stand before he talked? Logan had a feeling they were both going to find that out. 

The phone on the kitchen counter rang, a noise so explosively loud it almost made Logan jump out of his skin, and an inexplicable surge of fury filled him. Logan didn't want to be here; he didn't want to have to care. He didn't want have to go "easy" on this guy, just because he needed something out of him. He wanted to be on the road and forget all about this goddamn town. 

And he really, really wanted to hurt this fucker. He was tired of always holding himself back. 

He grabbed the phone, ripped the cord out of the wall, and flung the whole damn thing into the living room. "What the fuck is Purity?!" He roared. He was barely aware that the phone had collided with something made of glass, and shattered it as if it had been shot. 

It made Farris twitch on the floor, and his fear spiked. "Kill you," he muttered, coughing up a brief spray of bloody spittle. "Kill all you fucking freaks - " 

That was it. If he had any patience, it was gone. He kicked Farris over onto his back and dropped to his knees beside him, popping the claws of his left hand a millisecond before driving them deep into Farris's left shoulder. He screamed again, and his eyes were shut so tight with pain he probably hadn't even seen that the blades in his shoulder had sprung from Logan's hand. "Talk, you cocksucking piece of shit, or I'll rip your fucking arm off!" 

Farris finally opened his eyes, tears of pain spilling out, and the whites had the violent red splashes of burst blood vessels. He was in a world of hurt, and since he was a fucking coward, he couldn't hold out. "It'll kill - " Farris's eyes bulged as soon as he saw the knives in him were coming straight out of Logan's fist, and he couldn't seem to tear his gaze away. "Oh my god. Oh my god - " The pungent scent of urine filled the kitchen as Farris pissed himself in abject fear. 

"Talk!" He barked, twisting the blades in his shoulder just a millimeter. As he screamed, Logan pressed his fist against his right eye. "You have until the count of three. One." 

"W-we're Purity," he stammered, simultaneously trying to sob and hyperventilate. Needless to say, that didn't work out too well. "We are, we - " 

"We? Who? You and Branson?" 

He tried to nod, but with his fist pressed hard over his eye, Farris found that impossible to do. "We have to protect the human race - " 

This was some fucking human supremacist group? How fucking typical and boring. "All you cops? You're all in it?" 

"Me, Sinclair, Nelson, Chief Branson." 

"So why did you kill Gordon?" It still didn't make sense. Fidget was on the run from something somewhere else. It was possible bad fortune led him here and now, but he doubted it. 

"H-he told us we had to." 

"He?" 

"Chief Branson." Tears of pain were streaming constantly from his eyes now, down the side of his face, and it felt slimy on Logan's knuckles. But as much as it disgusted him, he didn't move his fist from his eye. 

Something still wasn't tracking, He had to swallow back his rage to think clearly, but still he felt completely at sea. What didn't make sense here? "Why?" 

"He was a freak, a fucking freak - " 

"You tortured him." He twisted the claws in his shoulder again, just another millimeter, and Farris's whole body seemed to spasm in pain as he screamed this time. The pool of blood beneath him on the floor was starting to grow exponentially now, and he wondered how much of Alisha's blood had ever been spilled on this floor. "You wanted something from him. What did you want?" 

Farris was trembling now, involuntary muscle contractions from the pain, and Logan could smell his slow drift towards shock. "N-names. Wanted names." 

"Whose names?" 

"People he told." 

Okay, now he knew he was missing something here. "People he told about what?" 

"Us." 

"That makes no fucking sense. You even signed your work!" He was thinking of the little graffiti tag on the wall. 

"It's something ... all of us, a plan ..." 

"A plan? What plan?" Farris was losing consciousness on him; his eye ( the only one he could see ) was glazing over, as if turning to ice in the socket. He ripped the claw out, and that new pain seemed to bring him back with a jolt. 

"I don't know. He didn't tell me, I didn't understand ... don't kill me, I don't know what's going on." 

"If you don't know what's going on, why kill him?" 

He was fading away again. Pussy - he hadn't lost that much blood; he knew he hadn't punctured an artery. "Freak, dirty goddamn freak ... " 

He could have been referring to him - and probably was - but Logan figured that was also his answer: he killed Fidget because he was a freak. He didn't have to know why he was killing him - he only had to know he was a mutant. That was enough. Logan, who still hadn't retracted his claws, sat back on his haunches, and drove the claws down into his right knee. 

Farris was too hoarse to scream properly, so he just squeaked. "After you get through your year of physical therapy, maybe you'll be able to beat up a woman or a kid again, but the limp'll slow you down," Logan snarled, withdrawing the claw from his shattered kneecap. He wanted to kill this fuck; he really, really did. He was a stupid animal, hardly a human being at all - 

( Why did that sound familiar? ) 

- and didn't deserve to keep sucking air. He retracted his claws and grabbed him hard by the chin, forcing the semi-conscious Farris to look at him. He knew if he changed the angle just a bit, he could snap his neck; a short, sharp death. Logan's fingers dug hard into his flesh, he could feel the bones of his lantern jaw starting to give, and he knew it would be so easy to kill this fuck. And it wasn't like he'd ever be connected to the murder, because Logan had a feeling he really didn't exist - only to the people who cut him open and played with his internal organs like pinballs. Otherwise he was a no one, a nobody, a nowhere man - and he couldn't be tied to the scene of any crime. 

"What names?" Logan demanded angrily. "What names did Gordon give you?" 

Farris was choking slightly, sobbing, trying not to scream, unable to do so because of the death grip Logan had on his jaw. "N-none. He didn't tell anyone ... he didn't know who to tell. He had nothing ..." 

He wondered how long they tortured Fidget before they finally decided he was probably telling the truth. Just the thought of the word torture left a very bad taste in his mouth. "I did kill her, you stupid shit," he snarled down into his face. "I tore her up and left her body for the wolves. I should do that to you, but I want you to live. I want you to live, and to suffer, and to know I can take away anything from you at any time. I'll be watching -  you even look at anyone funny, and I'll be waiting to snap your spine and rip your fucking guts out. Do you understand me?" 

Farris tried to nod, and Logan figured that was good enough - he couldn't stand the reek of his fear anymore. He slammed his head back hard into the floor, knocking him out. 

Logan stood and quickly moved away from him, so enraged he was shaking. He wanted to kill him; he wanted to rip him to pieces, just like he had said he had done to Alisha. 

He had to say that - Farris would never bother to look for a dead woman, and he knew he believed him. After all, he was a mutant freak, right? They did things like that. 

With a roar of anger he could no longer suppress, Logan put his foot through their mahogany coffee table, reducing it to kindling. He had to get his anger out somehow, and if he couldn't kill that fuck, he was going to take it out on something else. 

It was all a blur, honestly, just a blind surge of rage, but within minutes it looked like the formerly show room perfect living room of the Farris home had become a war zone. The mantel above the fireplace had been torn down, and was missing several bricks as well, most of which were pulverized granules on the pale blue carpet; holes had been punched and kicked in the walls, varying in size from cannonball to mortar; all pictures that had been hanging up were shards now, suggestions of objects as opposed to actual things; the t.v. was little more than a shattered casing, the glass having almost exploded on first impact, as if something inside it had been desperate to escape all along; all furniture, save for the couch, had been reduced to shapeless wrecks, stuffing spilling out like intestines. 

He came back to himself ankle deep in detritus, breathing hard and smelling his own blood - he cut himself on something. His hands were bloody, but they weren't even warm from the healing process; the cuts had healed long before now. 

And he thought Farris was a nutcase? Shit, did he have a right to talk? He just destroyed a room, and for what? Because he couldn't kill that guy? Why couldn't he kill David motherfucking Farris? 

Logan looked down at him, still laying flat out on the kitchen floor, in a small but growing pool of blood cut with piss. In spite of his size, he looked weak and worthless, a small man who got far too drunk on his own sense of power. And what was he now? 

His wife was gone. His career was pretty well over - that knee would never be right again. He might get his fat ass posted in a desk job, but somehow he didn't think Farris would last long in such a position. And worst of all, he'd talked, and got his ass kicked by a freak. 

Although he hated the man, and would have gladly killed him if he tried anything now or even looked at him funny, he wasn't conscious and couldn't even twitch. Right now he seemed like an easy kill, and not even worth his scorn. 

He left, pretty sure he was feeling sickened by Farris and not by his own actions, and tried to put together what he knew. Okay, so Purity was just another human supremacist organization, and Farris had been one of its idiot foot soldiers, along with about half the police force in this town. But what could Fidget know about some plan of theirs - a plan the foot soldiers had been out of the loop on - when he just got into town? And he wasn't trying to run from this town alone, he was trying to get as far from civilization as he could. If he just moved on to the next stop over the pass, he'd still be in one of those little burgs within the Whitewater police jurisdiction. 

Logan had left his truck parked just down the road from the Branson place, so he got in the four wheel drive that Farris had come home in, not actually caring that it was police issue, or that he didn't have the keys - he didn't need the keys. 

Once inside the four by four - and once he grew accustomed to the lingering stench of that awful hair product Farris used - he tried to guess the missing piece of this puzzle himself. Fidget was most likely running from "Purity" or something like it, but not the branch here; he'd have been far more desperate to escape and heavily armed if he knew they were here. So he was on the run from them or an affiliate in ... Calgary? 

The card he pulled from the book had a Calgary phone number - his mother lived at a Calgary address. That made sense, didn't it? And taking the actual open part of the highway led back towards there. So it was something he learned in Calgary that he was running from, only they nailed him here. 

What could he have learned? What was Purity so afraid of getting leaked out before they were ready for it? 

There was only one man he could ask, wasn't there? Branson, the man with the plan. 

As Logan started the truck, he wondered what exactly a man had to do to get arrested in this town. 


	5. Part 5

7 

    The police station was a very old brick building in what passed for a downtown, three and a half blocks down from Delroy's. It looked like nothing more than an old post office, save for the police vehicles parked out front, and the decided lack of mailboxes. 

Logan parked Farris's four by four in the snow frosted parking lot, and knew by the scent of snow in the air that they were bound to get more, and soon. Were they ever going to get that pass cleared? 

He paused on his way to the station to use the snow to "wash off" the blood on his hands, even though it was just his blood - how ironic that Farris had lost so much blood, and yet hardly stained him at all. He was sure that meant something, but he didn't know what, and honestly he didn't care. 

The station was virtually empty inside, and smelled of coffee, old fashioned mimeograph sheets, and boredom. Most of the light was artificial, flat white and harsh - like a department store changing room - and there were eight desk set in a neat geometric pattern beyond the front desk, which looked like it would have been more at home in an old, seedy hotel lobby. Each desk had a boxy computer and a varying sense of neatness to the paperwork and coffee mug rings on their surface. 

There was a single cop in the station, standing behind the horseshoe shaped front desk, a police band radio crackling with traffic reports. The cop behind the front desk was a bit shorter and more slender than Farris, in his late twenties, with slightly longer black hair and sleepy brown eyes, and a face so anonymous Logan had a feeling he was forgetting it even as he was looking right at him. "Can I help you?" The cop drawled, sounding bored. He had a nameplate on the front desk - "Constable Dupuis". Not one of the Purity members - lucky him. 

"Yeah, I'm looking for Chief Branson." 

"He's out on a call. Is there something I can help you with?" 

Logan shook his head. "Nah. Will he be long?" 

Dupuis shrugged. "I don't think so." 

"Mind if I wait for him?" 

Dupuis shrugged again. He was an extremely laid back cop. "Go ahead." 

Logan retreated to a hard plastic chair in front of the nearest desk, and sat down to wait, to feel his brain turn to mush. 

It was weird, but he didn't think he'd been in a lot of police stations in his life ... well, the lack of memories probably helped. But sometimes he got feelings about places even though he had no hard facts to back them up with, and he had no gut feelings about police stations in general. But then again, what he'd told Pat was true - they had nothing here that could take him down, or hold him for long. Okay, cuffs would be a pain in the ass, but he could deal with them if he had to, and they'd have to get them on him first. 

"So how do you know the Chief?" Dupuis asked, trying his damnedest to sound more casual than suspicious. And with his naturally sleepy eyed look he could almost pull it off. That was called making your looks work for you. 

What, wasn't he giving off a cop vibe? Logan wondered if he should have left the blood on his hands for verisimilitude. "We know each other from Calgary." 

Dupuis frowned, looking puzzled. "The Chief was in Calgary?" 

Logan smirked at the kid, almost feeling sorry for him. Did he have no idea at all what was going on under his nose? He wondered why they left him out of the loop. "Oh yeah. It's like a second home to him." 

Dupuis gave him a very dubious look, his eyebrow arching perfectly, when there was a spit of static, and a man's voice saying, "Adrien, you there?" 

Dupuis turned his attention to the radio behind the front desk, and went to it to speak to the cop on the other end of the line. Adrien? Now Logan was sure he'd never met a cop named Adrien before. He idly wondered if he got teased by the cops with "butch-er" names. He could almost hear the bad Rocky Balboa impersonations from here. 

While Adrien was busy on the radio, Logan twisted in his chair, and glanced at some of the papers on the desk behind him. Well, he had to slip most out of folders, but they hardly needed slipping out at all. At the top corner of one report was the typed notation Sergeant James Nelson. 

Nelson? He was one of the members of Purity, wasn't he? Logan had a sudden, overwhelming urge to piss, and wondered if Nelson's desk drawers were locked. 

He heard Dupuis get off the radio, and quickly sat back in his chair, pretending he hadn't been glancing at someone else's papers. "You're not a law enforcement officer, are you?" Dupuis said - it sounded like a question, but it wasn't. 

He didn't know why he was bringing that up, but Logan felt a sudden, undeniably urge to be an asshole. "Actually, I am - I'm an UO working out of Calgary." 

Dupuis stared at him in disbelief. "UO?" 

It was police shorthand for an "undercover operative" - in layman's parlance, a narc. And Logan had no idea how he knew that. "Narcotics," Logan lied, so easily he could almost believe himself. "Specifically looking into the increasing sales of methamphetamine around the truck stops and logging camps round here." He couldn't believe he was keeping a straight face. 

Dupuis continued to look dubious, but he was also starting to buy it - after all, wouldn't that explain the hair? The clothes? The way he casually sauntered into a police station like he owned the place? "You got your badge?" 

That was a trick question. Logan scoffed. "I'm a UO - of course not." 

"What's your name?" 

That was always a trick question, whether the Constable knew it or not. "Detective James Logan," he replied smoothly, borrowing Nelson's first name. "You can look me up on the database if you want." 

Logan knew he was a damn good poker player. Not only because he could literally smell if a person was happy about their cards or not, but because he could lie so easily,and had absolutely no fear when it came to calling a person's bluff. He had paid no attention to Dupuis's conversation on the radio, but he now sounded like he was in a hurry to do something, impatient, and if so, he wouldn't bother to access the Calgary police database. If he did, he was screwed, but risk small, win small. 

Dupuis studied him a moment longer, as if daring him to flinch, to make a guilty move, but he didn't; Logan knew that game too. And it was finally Dupuis who said, "No, that's okay. Can you hold down the fort for a couple minutes?" 

Logan had to bite his own tongue to keep from laughing. "Sure. What's up?" 

Dupuis huffed an impatient sigh through his nose as he busied himself putting on his cold weather gear over his uniform. "Davies and Sinclair are stuck on Grossman's Pass. They went on a call about a fender bender turned heated up there, and while they got the parties to calm down, their truck got stuck in what they seem to think is a sinkhole." 

"Can't call a tow?" 

"Anders is busy in Littlefall - he's on radio incommunicado until then." 

Logan assumed Anders was the one guy with a tow truck in this town - he knew Littlefall was one of those tiny burgs up in the mountains. "You'd think there'd be more than one guy with a tow truck around here." 

Dupuis snorted in humorous agreement, winding a definitely non-police issue scarf around his neck. "I'm thinking of taking early retirement and doing it as a sideline. I'll be rich in no time." 

Logan forced a knowing smile, like he really was a fellow officer that knew his pain. "Let me know if you do - I'm in for a cut." 

Dupuis gave him an anemic smile back, and said, "Chief Branson should be back before me. " He gestured towards the radio behind the front desk. "Give us a call if something comes up." 

"You got it," Logan agreed. Only in tiny towns in Canada could you ever get this level of trust. He almost felt sorry he was abusing it. 

Dupuis gave him a mock salute as he headed out the door, into the cold, and Logan knew why he had been left out of the Purity loop - he was probably a decent guy, a good cop, who would look upon "protecting the human race" from mutants as a perversion of their stated mission as police officers. If they told him about it and he balked, they'd probably have to kill him to keep him quiet, and even crooked piece of shit cops like Farris hesitated to kill their own. 

Unless they were mutants, of course, but that was a different story. 

He waited until Dupuis pulled out of the lot, and then he got up to have a look around Nelson's desk. A cursory scan turned up nothing of great interest, so after making a mess Nelson wouldn't forget, he went behind the front desk to see what he could call up on the computer, as it was still on. 

Accessing the database was a breeze, as Dupuis had inadvertently left access to that open as well, but what he could call up was disappointing. Purity got a big zero, as did Gordon Kean, and the names James Nelson and David Farris only called up service records that were so whitewashed it would have made the department proud. The search for Sinclair brought up a record for an Alan Sinclair, but it too held no surprises. 

He had just moved on to Branson when a truck with the police logo emblazoned on the side doors pulled into the parking lot. The guy who got out of the truck was older and beefy, maybe in his late forties, wearing a cowboy hat in lieu of a traditional police cap, but he wore one of their thick parkas. Logan knew he'd hit the luck jackpot when Branson appeared to be alone. 

The man came in, his large, bulldog like face ruddy from the cold, and Logan said, "Hey there Chief." 

He paused as he took off his gloves, bushy grey eyebrows moving low over pale blue eyes. "And who may you be?" 

Logan knew he could play this so many ways, and it was hard not to grin. "I'm Detective Logan, a UO from Calgary, narcotics. Adrien had to go rescue Sinclair and Davies, stuck on Grossman's Pass. I'm sort of holding things down until they get back." 

Branson looked him up and down slowly, scrutinizing him, his heavy, prominent jaw clenching tightly. He wasn't going to be as easy a sell as Dupuis, but Logan already knew pretending you belonged was eighty percent of everything. If you believed your own bullshit, chances were good other people would too. "Calgary huh? Know Lafferty?" 

Just from the way he said it, Logan knew he had pulled that name out of thin air - it was a trick question. Logan made himself frown, as if puzzled, and said, "No, I don't know anyone by that name." 

Branson nodded, posture loosening slightly. He had passed that test. "What is someone from Calgary narc doing around these parts?" 

"I was investigating a meth ring that seems to be centering around truck stops, and my leads brought me here." 

Branson scowled ever so slightly, deepening the folds of flesh around his jaw. He was a big guy, more hard fat than plain old fat, and Logan knew he'd put up a better fight than you'd ever expect. Well, for a normal human. "Let me guess - McQuarrie's?" Logan simply nodded. "I thought you looked familiar. Ya know, Guthrie runs a pretty tight ship." 

Guthrie was Pat's last name, and it was really all he could do not to laugh. Tight ship? He put on illegal fights and had illegal gambling in an outbuilding, and the Chief knew - he let it happen for a cut. Was he in on the drug trade too? How crooked was Branson? "Is that the man who owns the place? I haven't had the pleasure." Oh, he was such a fucking liar it was hard not to laugh. "Actually, it was why I'm here. I didn't tell Constable Dupuis, because I thought you might want to handle this yourself." 

"Oh?" Branson tensed up again. Oh yeah, he was guilty of a lot of things with Pat, wasn't he? Branson was so crooked he probably peed sideways. 

"I think one of your men may be facilitating the sale, if not outright using or taking a cut himself." 

"Really? Who?" He was trying not to tense up, trying not to show concern. 

"Constable David Farris." This was too goddamn much fun. Maybe that's why he got involved - maybe he knew, in the back of his mind, that this could be an entertaining break from his normal routine. 

Branson looked vaguely surprised, but Logan knew it was mostly an act. "Farris? You can't be serious. He's a good cop." 

It was so hard for him not to laugh at that he thought he might have to bite his tongue again, but this time hard enough to draw blood. "Believe me, I don't make this accusation lightly. I have no reason to believe the perps were lying." 

Branson took off his hat and fingered the rim in what Logan knew to be a nervous gesture. He had thinning hair, almost all prematurely grey, and if only he had a beard, he'd have looked like Santa Claus if he'd lost a hundred pounds and taken up a job as a bouncer in a seedy bar. "Do you have any evidence?" 

"I do, but I left it at the scene - I thought perhaps you might like to see it first." 

Branson gave him a curious look from beneath his bushy brows. "Aren't you worried about contamination? Disappearance?" 

"No. No one's getting out of this town." Before Branson could comment on what Logan knew to be a curious statement, he quickly said, "Shall we take your truck? I left my vehicle up the road so it couldn't be traced here." 

Branson continued to eye him warily, and Logan knew that the scammers were always the hardest to scam. "Where is this?" 

"The evidence? There's a small building hidden within the woods just off the interstate, about two miles from here. Know what I mean?" Logan had seen it driving past - it looked like the garden shed of a house, but the house was long gone, claimed once again by the woods. You could only see it at certain angles, as the shed was wedged between two large, fast growing pines on either side - it looked like the trees were slowly squeezing the outbuilding for information. It didn't appear completely abandoned, but Logan just figured it was used by squatters or hunters, or people looking for a secure place to get stoned. 

It was, honestly, a great place to kill someone. And Branson knew that too. "Yeah. Okay, sure - I'm sure Dupuis will be back soon enough." He put his hat back on, and reached for the door. "Let's go." 

Logan waited until his back was turned before he smiled. He wondered which one of them was going to try and kill the other first. 

Not that it mattered - even before the fight began, it was easy to predict the outcome. 

8 

    It only took a couple minutes to go to the spot he had named, and they hardly talked at all. 

Oh, Branson asked him how long he'd been a cop, and how long he'd been a narc, and Logan just pulled numbers out of the air before launching into a rambling story about how he almost got "burned" (discovered as a narc) on his first undercover case. He was pretty sure he was borrowing from the plot of a movie and at least one t.v. show and mixing them together, but he didn't care - not only did it make him seem more authentic, but it kept Branson from trying to make any more conversation.He went off road to park, taking the truck into the trees, hiding it from the view of the interstate. Logan wondered if Branson thought he actually wouldn't notice that. 

Branson paused to put on his gloves as he asked, "What is the nature of this evidence?" 

"Some physical stuff, drug paraphernalia that I saw him handle - so I know his prints are on it - and photos I managed to take." 

"Photos?" 

"Thanks to the digital revolution, I have a camera this big," he claimed, using his thumb and forefinger to measure out a space about half the size of a cigarette pack. He was pretty sure they had cameras that small. "Sometimes I can take pics of the perps when they're right in front of me, and they never notice." 

Branson quirked an eyebrow at him, but didn't say anything. Logan turned away and led the way into the woods before he laughed. 

Here the snow had mixed with dirt, so it looked like someone had sprinkled coffee grounds on a white carpet. He could smell the marks of animals that had been here: wolves, hares, a domesticated dog, many cats, several birds, even - ironically - a wolverine. Along with the dense growth of trees, the snow muffled almost all sound, so even though Branson was right behind him, clomping along like a bull moose, his footsteps were barely audible. By the time they reached the tree bracketed shed, it was just starting to snow, tiny flakes drifting down like confetti through the heavy branches. 

Logan turned to look at Branson, coming up behind him, his breath puffing out in white clouds before him like he was more steam engine than Human. "By the way, Chief, I'm afraid Farris isn't the only dirty cop in your unit." 

Branson stopped after he stepped over a fallen log, so covered with snow it looked like a speed bump. "Oh?" His voice was flat, had lost all inflection, and his belligerent jaw set once more. He wasn't as stupid as he looked. That was a good thing, really. 

"Other names have come up. Nelson, Sinclair ... anyone else you'd like to add to the list?" 

Branson had slipped his hands into his pockets, like he was cold, but he was wearing gloves. Logan had seen him very subtlety reach under his seat while he was getting out of the truck - surely a weapon, probably one untraceable to the police. A knife? Oh, he so dearly hoped it was a knife. "I don't have the slightest fucking idea what you're talking about," he said, his voice as cold as the air. 

"Let's cut the shit, okay? I know." 

"Know what?" 

Logan quirked an eyebrow at him. "Do I really need to draw ya a picture here, Chief?" 

Branson glared at him, trying to stare him down, but this man wasn't even close to intimidating to him, not even if he had a fucking stick of dynamite in his pocket and the entire Canadian Special Forces (why did that almost sound familiar?) backing him up. It wasn't going to help him now; nothing was going to save him now. Hadn't Branson's mother ever told him not to get in a car with a stranger? "What is it you want? A cut, is that it? Hush money?" 

He shook his head, grinning at the offer. This just confirmed what he thought about him: Branson was so rotten to the core his bone marrow was probably black. Even though sadistic weasels like Farris would gladly kill anyone but hesitate when it came to cops, Branson didn't have that hesitation, especially when it was a cop from another department, one threatening to nail his fat ass to the wall. As soon as he intimated he was going to nail Farris for something, Branson had decided to kill him, because Farris might rat him out. And even if Logan said he wanted a cut, Branson planned to kill him here and now - no outsiders, no blackmail. "I want you to tell me about Purity." 

He blinked rapidly, hiding a flinch. He didn't expect him to know that much. But still, he tried the idiot route again. "What the fuck are you talking about?" 

"Purity, your little Human supremacist group with Sinclair, Nelson, Farris, and some shits down in Calgary. I made up the meth thing, but are you up to your ass in that too?" 

Branson pulled his hand out of his pocket, and finally showed his weapon. Not a knife, but a Walther PPK semi-automatic pistol - definitely not police issue, so a ballistics trace wouldn't tie to the department. Slick. Had he murdered before - beside Gordon? There were a million places to hide the body out here, and there was a good chance the animals would take care of it for you. "You're not a cop, are you?" 

"What was the clue, Columbo? No, I ain't no fucking cop, and some observation skills you got there if you thought you recognized me from McQuarries. Were you never around for the fights? Would it have helped if I took off my shirt?" 

Finally he seemed to get it, and the realization only subtlety altered his stony expression. "Oh, wait - you're one of them, aren't you? One of Pat's finds. I shoulda recognized that hair. You're ... the wolf or something." 

"Wolverine." 

"Whatever the fuck. Is Pat trying to weasel out of payin' me, is that it? Are there more thugs waiting around here?" 

Logan shook his head. "I want to know the name of your fellow shitheads in Calgary, and what they told you Gordon Kean knew." 

He kept his expression perfectly neutral, but Logan saw surprise briefly flash through his hard eyes. "Don't bother to lie," Logan warned him. "Farris tried, and it did him no good." 

"Farris?" 

"Yeah. I really oughta call him an ambulance." 

Branson raised a snowy eyebrow, moving the muzzle of the gun ever so slightly. "Do you really think you can intimidate me?" 

"Do you think you can intimidate me?" Logan shot back at him. "Tell me about Purity, Roger. What's the plan?" 

There was nothing in his expression, in his face - it was like he'd checked out and left nothing behind. Logan moved then, but a beat too late. 

The bullet hit him in the left temple like a donkey kick to the skull, and he didn't realize he'd been knocked backwards until he hit the ground. His vision went liquid, and the sky seemed as white as the ground, as if reality had been inverted somehow. "You stupid piece of shit," he heard Branson say distantly, as if he was moving away from him as opposed to coming closer. "You had no idea who you were fucking with." 

Logan could feel the snow melting around his hands, under his neck, and it helped him hold on to consciousness as the corner of his forehead where the bullet had hit him and ricocheted off ( Branson must not have noticed that little detail ) burned as his healing factor kicked in. His skull still felt like it was ringing like a bell, but he could deal with that. 

He played dead until Branson was in range. 

It was hard not to blink as snowflakes fell into his eyes, but he managed as he caught the shadow of Branson entering his vision. Now he was just muttering curses to himself, like having to dispose of a body ruined his whole afternoon. 

Letting his ears as much as his eyes judge Branson's approximate position, he kicked out. The flat of his foot hit Branson's left knee so hard the leg bent the other way. 

The bone cracked as loud as a rifle shot, and Branson screamed like a banshee as he collapsed to the ground. Logan quickly scrambled over to him, knocking the gun out of his hand as he attempted to raise it, and grabbed Branson by the throat. "My fucking leg! You broke my fucking leg!" He wailed, as his eyes seemed to settle on Logan's temple. There was probably still blood there, but Logan knew exactly what he was thinking : 'Where's the bullet hole?' 

"You had no idea who you were fucking with, you stupid piece of shit," he growled down into his confused face. "I was one of 'em all right, but you guessed the wrong "them"." Logan held his free right hand right over Branson's face, made a fist, and popped his claws, but slowly, so he could watch them come out millimeter by millimeter. 

The fear coming off him was almost rancid, and his heart was pounding so loudly he was afraid the fat fuck was going to have a heart attack on him before he could get a single answer out of him. "Now I'm tired of fucking around, and by tryin' to shoot me you have really pissed me off," he snarled. Branson seemed unable to look at anything but the claws growing out of his hand, his eyes so wide they were nearly all whites. "I want to kill you like you killed Gordon, but that seems almost too good for an evil fucker like you. I should break every fucking bone in your body and leave you for the real wolverines. I bet you'll feed a whole bunch of 'em until the summer." 

"D-don't - " he stammered, but he wasn't sure what Branson was asking him not to do. There were so many things to choose from. 

"You want to spare your worthless life? Talk - tell me about Purity, tell me about Calgary, tell me how deep and wide this fucking thing goes, or I'm going to start carving you a new face." He let the tip of one claw dig into his skin at the bridge of Branson's Roman nose, until a small trickle of blood starting oozing down his fear paled face. "Lie to me, and this is the first part you lose." 

As soon as he remembered how to speak, Branson started to talk like his life depended on it. 

But then again, it did. 

9 

    It took all night and into the morning to drive to Calgary, and by that time Logan was so tired he found a good spot to pull over and sleep before he passed out. He hoped that being in such an odd spot - sleeping in the front seat of his new ( well, new to him ) truck would keep him from sleeping too deeply ( hence dreaming ), but sadly that wasn't the case. 

But it was an odd dream, one he barely remembered upon waking. He was ... he was where? It was cold ... and he was slogging through snow and ice that almost came up to his thighs. He could smell blood, he had blood on his hands, but it wasn't his own. In the pearly grey light of dawn, the blood on the surface of the snow looked black, a spill of ink on the permafrost. Up ahead, there was a small hill, so dark it looked like it was made of dirt, but as he got closer he realized it was a mound of bodies. What the fuck ..? 

And then he heard something behind him - 

Logan woke up with the panicky feeling he was about to be attacked, but as he sat up, he almost hit his head on the edge of the steering wheel. Okay, just a dream. Fuck, he hated sleeping. 

He had to squint as his eyes adjusted to the sunlight now streaming in the windows, as it had cleared since he nodded off. The lower the elevation, the less snow there was, and in fact it looked as if Calgary hadn't gotten a single flake at all. 

He stretched his arms as best he could in the truck, rolling his shoulders, working out the kinks and aches. Sleeping in a car was never comfortable, but he didn't see the point in getting a hotel room if he didn't have to. And he wasn't planning on staying in Calgary long - big cities full of people made him feel inexplicably crowded and vulnerable, and frankly lots of people in one place always caused a hellacious stink. 

Well, if he had to have a nightmare, at least it didn't involve guys in HazMat suits. And he didn't claw the shit out of the seat, so that was something. And it was just a nightmare, right? Not a memory. It couldn't have been a memory ... right? 

He was hungry and desperately needed to take a piss, so he got back on the road and stopped at the first place he saw that wasn't a fast food restaurant ( they were always too crowded, and the smell of the grease they used almost knocked him flat ). Logan ended up in a sad cafe called The Blue Rose, where the grease smell was almost as pungent as any fast food joint, and the men's room smelled like it hadn't been cleaned since last year. But he'd been in worse places. 

As he sat in his window booth, waiting for his eggs and trying to ignore the parchment and cigarette smoke smell of the old guys slurping diesel grade coffee at the end of the front counter, he pulled out the card he had in his pocket, the one that simply read Carnivale Outré. He mulled over everything Branson had told him, desperate to save his own ass, and he wondered if he had managed to drag himself out of the woods and get to a phone by now. Had he warned his friends in Calgary he might be coming for them? 

He hoped so. He honestly did. 

It was the only reason he left him alive, in fact. He wanted Branson to send up an emergency flare, so there'd be a welcoming committee of motherfucking redneck bastards waiting for him when he crashed their nest. He wanted them all - or as many as possible - in one place. He wanted to take out as many as possible in one fell swoop. But what if he'd died of exposure? Naw, he had too much blubber. 

Not for the first time, he wondered why he was doing this. Gordon wasn't going to come back to life - and did he want him to anyways? He didn't know the kid! And surely if the plan was as big as Branson seemed to intimate, other people - other mutants - had to know, or would soon enough. 

But would they - or could they - shut it down? Logan knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he could. He could take them out before they killed any more people. And frankly, it made a change, didn't it? Kicking asses, and not having to take a beating to sell the drama. 

And no longer holding back; he was tired of holding back. And Purity were going to find out first hand just how dangerous a mutant could be when he really set his mind to it. 

The waitress, a matronly sort with a name tag that said "Angie" on her white and powder blue uniform, came by with his breakfast, and asked curiously, "What are you smiling at, hon?" 

He tucked the card back in his pocket, and said, "I just thought of somethin' funny, that's all." 

Yeah - this was going to be fucking hilarious. 


	6. Part 6

10 

    It didn't take long for him to remember why he hated Calgary. 

Oh, not just the city itself, actually all of this part of the Alberta province - all the "prairie provinces", simply because they were just that: flat and oftentimes featureless, unless you counted fields and houses as "features". He didn't. 

He never realized how accustomed he had grown to the mountains and the higher elevations, except when he came down at times like these. And as much as he hated the cold, he was used to it, and the safety it brought. The snow drove people inside, kept them from coming out, and only now did he realize that's what he liked about it;it was an added safety net, an extra bulwark against humanity. It was depressing to think that he was still trying to hide from the nameless threat he could sometimes feel breathing down his neck, but maybe he was just kidding himself to think he had ever gotten over it. Would it be the first time? 

Finding the directions to Carnivale Outré was not hard - all he had to do was call information and tell them that he wanted an address to match with the number. The problem was it led him to one of the most depressed blocks within range of downtown Calgary; it would have been a slum if only people lived here, but it was mostly several blocks of abandoned buildings and small businesses barely hanging on, victims of the rocky economy, rotting like capitalism's beached whales dropped into the heart of the city. And his bad feeling was confirmed when the address led to a pay phone outside of an abandoned, boarded up storage facility, one of those places where you could rent what were essentially small sheds for months at a time. But no more, because it was shut down, a heavy padlock and chain hanging on the gate of the chain link fence where the entrance had once been. Logan wondered what would happen if he called the number, but he didn't have a cell phone, and there was no open business with a phone within sight of this particular phone.Still, there was something odd about the place, and he went up close to check it out. 

The street was perfectly abandoned. He could hear cars out on the roads surrounding the place, but for the ten minutes he stood there waiting, none turned down here. Certainly he was the only pedestrian in sight. 

He crossed the street, leaving the alley where he'd been hiding out, doing minor reconnaissance, but he got no sense of being watched, caught no scent of anyone else. He was starting to regret wearing all these layers; it wasn't hot per se, but he was overdressed. When he got back to his truck, he was getting rid of the flannel shirt. 

The fence was maybe ten feet tall, counting the strings of barbed wire running across the top, and Logan knew he could just cut through the damn thing, but he didn't want to announce himself just yet. No, he - and the claws - had to be kept a surprise as long as possible. Of course, if Branson did warn them, surely he'd have babbled something about him having claws in his hand, but he just saw the one set. He wondered if he had mentioned he was impervious to bullets. Technically he wasn't, they just didn't do much to him, but Branson didn't know that either. 

He took off his jacket and slung it up over the barbed wire, leather side down. He climbed the fence, which wasn't thrilled about his weight, but it held. As soon as he was over the covered barbed wire, he jumped down to the macadam on the other side, landing on his feet. He reached up, grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and yanked it down, shrugging it back on before he started walking towards the shut down buildings. 

Was that all they had for security? Pathetic. Even Fidget could have handled that. 

What was wrong here was now apparent. It was supposedly abandoned, right? Well, the scent of other people lingered in the air - lots of other people. A whole slew of people had passed through here, fairly recently too. A very busy abandoned site. 

Heat seemed to be stored in the pavement, radiated up as he walked, and he was really regretting his clothing choice now. Maybe he should chuck the flannel and the undershirt for the time he stayed in Calgary. 

All the scents seemed to concentrate and coalesce near the largest building,which had a sort of industrial strength padlock and cable chain cord holding its sliding door shut. He put his ear to the door, the metal hot and almost uncomfortable against his skin, but he heard nothing inside. He would swear he almost felt something under his feet, though, a thrum beneath the pavement. 

Whatever was going on here, it probably didn't start until dark. Which meant he'd best come back then to get the majority of these fucks. 

Maybe Purity had spread its poisoned roots to other places, but the tap root was here, and he knew that if the main root died, everything else did as well. Cut the head off, and the body would fall. 

Man, that sounded good. He hoped he really got to put that cliché to use. 

11 

    He ended up in a seedy bar called - inexplicably - The Lazy B, drinking mediocre beer and biding his time. He used one of the pay phones by the men's room to call the Carnivale Outré number, even though he couldn't view the pay phone in front of the warehouse from here. 

Not that it mattered. He let it ring ten times, then hung up - no answer, not even a distant click of a trace on the line. Maybe it too was a night only thing. 

The CBC news droned for a while on the t.v. over the bar, and Logan was honestly stunned he wasn't featured - "Crazed mutant with bad hair goes on rampage in tiny mountain town. Footage at eleven." - but hey, maybe they were saving it for the six o'clock broadcast. 

The bartender was a reasonably attractive woman, with long, curly reddish brown hair and a sturdy build, and he asked her for a phone book, although at the time he had no idea why. Then he found himself looking up Keans - he found what must have been Gordon parents, M. and D. Kean. Wasn't the address listed with the phone number the same as the one on the envelope? 

He closed the book and gave it back to Hope ( he heard someone call her that ) as she walked by, and she paused to look him over. "New in town, huh?" Her blue eyes were so pale they were almost grey, and she was young enough that she still had a sprinkling of freckles across her cheek. He got a sense of interest from her, but she was too young, and he didn't really have the time anyways. 

"Just passing through," he replied. "Ever heard of a place called Carnivale Outré?" 

She frowned as she thought, a little crease forming between her brows. "No, I can't say I have. But I just moved here two months ago from Moosejaw, so I don't know everything there is know about the city yet." 

"Military brat?" There was a major air base in Moosejaw - it was pretty much the only thing in Moosejaw. 

She graced him with a delicate smile. "Good guess. Yeah, my parents are both military. I think they were a little disappointed I didn't up for the service." 

"Well, some of us don't take orders well." 

Her smile held steady, grew slightly. "You can say that again. Where are you from?" 

He almost smiled. "Oh, everywhere and nowhere." 

"Man of mystery, hmm?" She leaned forward, and conspiratorially whispered, "You know, I get off at eight. I could show you some of the more interesting parts of Calgary. There are some, I swear." 

That did make him smile. What was it with him and women? He wasn't screamingly repulsive, but he also knew he wasn't exactly a pretty boy either. Not that he was looking a gift horse in the mouth, it was just it did strike him as curious sometimes. "I'd love to, darlin', but I'm afraid I have an appointment tonight. Can I get a rain check?" 

She made a show of thinking about it, although the sly look she gave him was a bit of a giveaway. "Maybe. I guess we'll have to see if you behave yourself." 

Just then a new customer came in, and she had to go serve him, leaving him smiling to himself. Maybe he didn't exactly get why women liked him, but he was certainly glad they did. 

As it got later it got busier, so Hope didn't have much time to flirt with him, and as it was he was getting restless.He could only stay in one place - around the type of men who frequented these kind of bars - for so long, so he left Hope a generous tip and shoved off. 

It wasn't night yet, but he had killed a few hours, so he decided to walk around and burn off some steam, see if he could find some trouble. 

But apparently there was no trouble to be had in Calgary, beyond Purity, and they hadn't showed their ugly, inbred faces yet. They were probably waiting for the cover of darkness - like that would do them any good. 

His aimless wanderings had taken him past a theater, and, seeing on the marquee that   
the latest John Woo flick was showing, he decided to go see it. He was soon glad he did, because he hadn't laughed so hard in a long time. 

It was just the plot and the actors supposedly doing the stunts. It looked like everyone in Hollywood had his healing factor and metal skeleton - who'd have thunk it? And since coherence obviously wasn't necessary to become a screenwriter, there was hope for him yet. 

Humans. 

He used to like John Woo too, back when he made films in Hong Kong, his "chop socky" days. He made violent films about violent people in a violent world. Bizarrely, he could relate to that; the mind boggled. No, they never really tried to be realistic, but they felt more realistic somehow. The images flashing across the screen at him now seemed as flat as they genuinely were, as inauthentic as Americanized versions of Chinese food, but far less appetizing. 

He really did sound like a grouchy old coot sometimes, didn't he? But he couldn't be more than thirty something ... maybe. What if he wasn't? What if he was really fifty? Sixty? Even older? How would he know? And what could he do about it if he was? 

It was another thing he decided not to think about it. 

By the time he emerged from the theater, the sky was burnt orange, the sun setting far from his point of visibility, painting the clouds the color of persimmons. It was almost but not quite time, so he risked venturing into a fast food joint and getting a gut busting burger bomb. It smelled like they changed the grease trap recently - that was good. 

He sat in a window booth and watched the sky cycle through all the shades of crimson, deepening into indigo. There were a few more cars on the street now, a few more people on the sidewalk, and he wondered if things were starting to hop at the supposed location of Carnivale Outré. 

He found a pay phone outside a convenience store and called the number again. After the fifth ring, he heard the distinct click of a trace, and instantly hung up. Not that it mattered - it was a phone outside the Quick Stop, for Christ's sake. How did you trace one person here? 

There was definitely more action on the neighboring streets, and by the time he turned on to Harvey street,where the Carnivale was supposedly located, he saw cars parked on the opposite side of the street, even though he saw no one the sidewalk. 

He walked up to the fence surrounding the storage area, and saw that the gate was now open, the lock and chain now hanging on one side of the fence. He could smell more people, their perfume, deodorant, hairspray, cologne and cigarettes leaving an odor trail for him to follow. 

And that was the problem - from no one to too many people in this short amount of time. Word must have started getting out about it. Shit. 

Logan pushed the gate open and started across the cracked cement lot, aware now that the thrum beneath his feet was steady and rhythmic; did others feel about it? He had to open up his hearing to catch more than a feeling of it - music all right, loud and underground. 

He followed the neon scent of people to the larger warehouse he'd discovered earlier, and this time - again - the lock was undone, although the door was not open. First he walked around the building, giving it a cursory visual inspection, but there was nothing unusual on the outside. They weren't as dumb as they seemed, then - it would all be inside.Made sense. 

He had to slide the door aside, on its recessed track, and he was instantly assailed by music and the smell of too many people, and he had to batten down his own senses before venturing forth. 

The floor was missing, and opened up into what seemed to be a nightclub, situated below the ground in what seemed like someone's basement, except a storage bunker wouldn't have a basement, and it was fucking huge. 

Neon lights, red and blue, pulsed in time with the music, which he dimly recognized as White Zombie - "More Human Than Human". Oh, that was so fucking hilarious he had to remember to pencil in a laugh over that later. 

A metal staircase led from the door down to the club, and while Logan knew this had to be violating about thirty safety codes, that was kind of the point, wasn't it? Underground clubs - in this case, literally - and raves didn't always take place in the safest locations. Which is why, if something went horribly wrong, no one would be terribly surprised. 

As he went down the stairs, which trembled in time with the bass and didn't seem to care much for his weight ( yet another code violation ), he glanced up at the roof. The place was lit for atmosphere - which meant barely at all, and the strobes of neon sent lurid shadows chasing across every surface, but Logan was able to discern what looked like crossbeams. 

Since when did a tin roof need crossbeams? 

But not only was the ceiling poorly lit, these were just kids - kids mostly getting drunk and stoned out of their fucking minds, hoping to get laid or at least get a major buzz on. In the comfort of their own "kind". 

Mutants. 

12 

    There were maybe thirty five kids here, a roughly even split between male and female ( as far as he could tell ), ranging in ages from fifteen ( and trying to pass for older ) to mid-twenties ( and trying to pass for younger ). He had no idea there were this many mutants in Calgary, but there were probably more, especially if you counted the outskirts - this was just the group that had heard of the place, and fell in the age demographic they seemed to be shooting for. 

As soon as he set foot on the concrete floor, also thrumming in time with the bass, the kids who saw him stared. He was by far the oldest person in the place, and they probably all wondered who invited their dad along. But some jailbait by the bar ( and yes, they had bothered to put one in - probably pulled out of a pub before it got sold and turned into a Tim Horton's ), a blonde who had two stubby white horns on the crown of her head and her Asian friend, who had no visible mutation save for pupils shaped like starbursts ( unless those were contacts ... but somehow he doubted that ), gave him appraising looks and friendly smiles. He didn't return either. And he thought Hope was too young for him? Shit, these girls could call him in ten years if they were still interested. Well, maybe not the blonde - blondes never really did much for him. 

He found a free spot at the bar, and stood there looking it over. He'd picked a great spot, as just beneath the bar and to his left was a bottle of tonic water, in easy reach. Perfect. 

The "bartender" ( actually he was probably just the guy watching the booze ) was a string bean of a guy, not much older than the kids. Was he a mutant? He was homely, with a long face and stringy looking blonde hair, but that just made him unpleasant to look at. "Got any vodka around here?" He shouted over the music. 

Shit, ten bucks for a glass of vodka? Rip off artists. He gave him thirty bucks and bought the bottle. He shunned the glass and just broke the seal, helping himself to a swig of it straight from the bottle. He didn't like vodka much - it had no real taste, it just burned, but this stuff was pretty high proof, and that's what he was looking for. 

There seemed to be a couple of doors, hidden in the painted shadows, and he could see men appearing beside them, closer to his age and manner of dress, and he knew the big bads had made him. Well, how could they not? He stood out like a Sikh at the Vatican. And surely they had been warned by Branson. 

Logan glanced around casually as Rage Against The Machine kicked in ( they were trying to deafen him, weren't they? ), took another swig of the vodka, and then held it out over the end of the bar, within arm's reach of him. It was a simple matter of spilling out a large quantity of the stuff, until it dripped off the edge of the scarred wooden bar, and then he set the bottle aside, out of reach of the still growing puddle of booze. 

He felt in his pocket for the book of matches he grabbed at the Quick Stop, and as he pulled out the book, he ripped off one of the matches, but didn't bother to "close cover before striking". There was a reason that dumb ass warning was on there. 

As he lit it, he tossed the book and the match together. They hissed in midair as the match caught the entire book, causing a bright flare of yellow flame, and then the entire flaming ball landed in the puddle of vodka. 

It went up with a muffled "whump", orange flames dancing up greedily as if they had just been waiting to be released, and just in case someone hadn't noticed it, he shouted, "Fire!" 

The effect was immediate and just what he was counting on - people screamed and surged for the exit, and he hoped no one got trampled. But as long as they got the fuck out of here, he was happy. 

He was reaching for the bottle of tonic water behind the bar when a Goth girl came up to him. In spite of her attempt to look like the personification of Death from that comic book, it was clear she was about sixteen, and Native American, quite possibly Cree ( which begged the question of what she was doing in a shithole like Calgary ). He grabbed her arm, and asked, "What the hell are you doin'?" 

She looked a bit startled, but said, "I can help. I can become water." As if to prove that, he felt her arm become almost gelatinous in his grip. Now there was an odd mutation - she could be her own ammo in a water balloon fight. 

"The fire ain't the problem," he whispered to her. "The bomb is." 

Her dark eyes, ringed so thick with black eyeliner she almost looked like a raccoon, widened appreciably. He bet she was pretty under all that make up. "Bomb? You're kidding, right?" 

"Don't ever be a hero, kid. They die way too young." He felt he was speaking from experience there, and he didn't know why. She just stared back at him, still stunned, so he added insistently, "Run." 

For a moment she just stared at him, and he wasn't sure she was going to move, but finally she did, and he let go of her arm as she turned and ran back towards the stairs. 

The place was pretty much cleared out by the time he grabbed the bottle of tonic water, and rather than open it and pour it out on the flames, he simply threw the bottle down hard in the center of the fire. Glass and water flew everywhere, essentially extinguishing the flames. 

Of course he wasn't alone - the thugs had appeared now, the non-mutant architects, just like he knew they would. Right now there were six of them, most likely armed in spite of what Branson told them, and he wondered if there'd be more joining them. 

Someone killed the music, and he shifted position, moving from his torn vinyl bar stool to an unburned portion of the bar. He held on to his vodka bottle, but didn't move to take a drink yet. 

"So let me tell you a story," he said to the men, mostly casually and anonymously dressed. One was carrying a sub-machine gun on a strap around his shoulder, apparently subscribing to the quantity of bullets not quality theory. "You've probably heard it before. This kid - let's call him Gordon - discovered he was a mutant, and, a bit freaked out about it, ran away from home. So he hustles on the street - dangerous, but easy money, especially for someone as young as him - and one night he gets picked up by this older guy who's had too much to drink. This guy apparently gets chatty after blow jobs, and when a card falls out of his coat pocket, he tells Gordon all about it. A plan to wipe out mutants. But here's the thing - a beautiful plan; their first hit will be a place called Carnivale Outré. Underground club, they plan to get the word out in the "mutant circles", and when they get a full enough house - oops! Place collapses, kills everyone inside, a tragic accident. An accident that will be repeated, in various forms, wherever Purity takes root. Mutants would appear to blow themselves up while making bombs for their "terrorist group" next; various other unfortunate twists of fate would follow. Now, it can't wipe them all out yet, but hey, the only good mutant is a dead mutant, right? It's a start. 

"Little did the pedophile know that he was bragging of this to a mutant." Logan took a swig of vodka, then continued as they continued to close in on him. "Now Gordon knew he had to tell someone, but he didn't know who. He had learned not to trust the cops, and that was a good thing, as there were some crooked cops in on this. But these dickheads found out that he knew, and he was one of "them" - remember to capitalize that, or add an exclamation point, like that old '50's film about the giant ants - and when the kid seemed to disappear, they sent out word along their network. It's not much of a network, but it does have some powerful players, namely cops. Where Gordon was headed - and whether he actually intended to tell anyone - is up in the air, as he's dead. But here's the real irony, boys. After killing him, and signing the work - which is, by the way, the most dumb ass thing you could do - the information fell into the hands of someone who could really hurt you. 

"Gordon was no threat to you, and he never was. But he was a mutant, and he also knew one of you liked to get sucked off by little boys, so he had to be dealt with. Now you've got yourself a bigger problem, and I ain't gonna be gotten rid of as easily or neatly as Gordon. Also, I ain't tellin' no one - I'm shuttin' you down myself." 

Finally the guy with the machine gun, who had a stocky build, a bullet shaped skull, and a haircut so severe it looked physically painful, sneered, "Yer fulla yourself, aren't ya mutie?" 

"For good reason." He wondered if he was the one who kept a wife at home, but secretly had a thing for underage boys. That haircut seemed to scream psychological problems. "You ain't got what it takes to kill me - I'm not sure anyone does. Branson tell you his head shot did nothin' to me but knock me on my ass for a second? A lot of things knock me on my ass, but I have yet to meet something that can do it permanently. Although I'm willing to find it, believe me. I'm tired. I'm tired of you redneck fucks and your deeply fucked up world, but it seems I'm stuck here." 

"We can fix that," Machine Gun promised. 

Logan shook his head and smirked humorlessly. "Nah, ya can't. But let this homicidal  mutie fill you in on a couple things. Your plan is fatally flawed - all these so called "accidents" - even if you have cops manipulatin' the evidence - are going to strike someone as suspicious." 

"Who cares?" A guy from the back chimed in. He was taller than Machine Gun, but five years younger and sixty pounds lighter. "They're just freaks - no one will give a fuck." 

"True, except - and here's the real flaw - mutants. Do you think we're stupid? Bunches of us die and keep dyin' in so called "accidents", and we'll figure it out." 

"So what?" Machine Gun snapped. Logan casually glanced over the men, wondering who had the detonator. He bet one of the cops. While they weren't in uniform, there were three here he judged to be cops simply from their build - Machine Gun was one of them. 

"So what? Remember why you're so fuckin' terrified of us - 'cause we can do shit you can't, in some cases on a broad scale. Now I ain't one of the ones that can vaporize where you stand, I'm just one who can kill you all without breakin' a sweat. Maybe, if you get lucky, you'll be able to hurt me, but not for long, as that's my deal - I heal. I  am - as much as I hate to think about it - for all intents and purposes, as close to immortal as someone can probably get. So your worst will never be good enough to handle the likes o' me." 

Machine Gun scoffed. "So you're the "man of steel", is that it?" 

Logan gave him a savage grin, flashing his canines at him. "No, adamantium. Steel's for pussies." 

They exchanged some uncomfortable glances, and Logan guessed they had no idea what adamantium was. Machine Gun hefted his Uzi up, bracing the stock against his shoulder and looking down the sight at him. "You think you scare us, you mutie freak bastard?" 

"Oh no. You're far too stupid to be scared,you limp dicked wonders," he replied, and flung the vodka bottle at him. 

It hit and exploded on the gun as he opened fire, and Logan let himself fall backwards behind the bar, hitting the floor on his back as the wood exploded into jagged fragments as the bullets ripped them apart. 

He landed painfully on the souvenir he had taken from Branson - the Walther PPK, tucked in the back of his jeans. Worse than landing on your keys. He pulled it out and turned his head away to avoid the flying splinters ( he bet it hurt like fuck to get them in your eyes ) , and he realized that Machine Gun was cursing over the staccato cough of the gun. "Bastard fucking freak cocksucker," he growled, and Logan was pretty sure he got some glass in the face. Poor baby. 

How did he feel about lead? 

Logan rose up on his knees, feeling bullets tug at his clothes, and reached his arm over the bar, gun aimed at where he knew Machine Gun to still be. Even as bullets ripped into his arm, shoulder, and side, most bouncing off his metal skeleton. Sometimes the ricochet ripped through more muscle and skin, making it worse, but he knew if his bones could shatter bullets would put him in a far worse world of hurt. 

With his first volley of shots he heard a hard grunt, and a wet noise like the Cree girl had come back and splattered herself on the floor in an attempt to make them slip, but he knew she wouldn't smell like blood. 

Shots were still flying, but no longer Uzi shots, and it wasn't hard to guess why - judging from the stench, Machine Gun was bleeding demised. Although he knew it was a risky move, Logan jumped over the bar and faced the remaining gunmen, letting them see the bullets slam into his torso, rip open his cheek, and letting them see his skin heal up almost instantaneously beneath the torn fabric of his clothes. 

"Come on!" He taunted, stalking towards them. He still had the Walther out, but now he was holding it muzzle down, not interested in a gun battle. "Think I was shitting you, you stupid fucks?! Waste your fuckin' ammo on me so I have an excuse to kill you!" Actually, he already had his reasons to kill them, but the pain of impact and healing was fueling his rage, and there were times when he got so angry that it felt good - like it was lava surging through his veins, not blood, and it brought on a sort of high, like the alcohol buzz he could only imagine since his system would never let him feel it. It was yet another thing that convinced him he was probably not completely sane, but right now he didn't care. Sanity had no place here. 

The men were getting the picture now. Jaws dropped, some stopped firing, guns limp in their hands, and the one nearest a door reached for it. Fear was starting to fill the room, a strong undertone to the taste of cordite, and he wondered how many would wet their pants if he popped his claws right now. 

Finally one of the more muscular guys, one of the ones he had mentally pegged as a cop, pulled something out of his coat pocket. It looked like nothing more than a black handle grip, maybe ripped off a kid's bike, but he held onto it so tightly the knuckles of his hand were turning white. "Freeze, freak, or I'll bring this place down on your fucking head!" The man shouted, almost shaking with fear. 

Would he do it? Did he have the balls? Logan gave him a predatory grin, all teeth, and snapped, "I thought you'd never reveal yourself, you stupid piece of shit." 

And then he lunged at him, wondering if the redneck had the cajones to press the trigger and kill them all. 


	7. Part 7

13 

    Before Logan could even lay a finger on the guy, the cop standing right next to the Demolition Man elbowed him sharply in the head, sending him crashing to the floor. "You stupid fuck," the man spat, trying to rip the detonator from his hand. "You'll kill us all!" 

Then Logan joined the scrum, grabbing the tackler by the back of the neck and tossing him aside, into a couple of his friends, as another lunged at him and drove a knife into his back. 

Or, more correctly, he tried.  As soon as the knife pierced Logan's skin, it hit bone and shattered, and while it hurt like fuck, it didn't prevent him from lashing back with a fist and nailing the asshole flush in the head. He let out the briefest yelp before hitting the floor like a sack of garbage.  Demo Man - the guy with the detonator - had backed up against the far wall, so scared he was flour white, shaking now, his fear sweat reeking like fermented vinegar. He still held the detonator in a death grip. "Stay back," he stammered, looking between Logan and his supposed friends. "This mutie is fucking evil. We have to stop him." 

Logan heard the hammer click back on a gun, and glanced over his shoulder to see one of Demo's friend aiming a revolver at his head. "We can finish off the freak another way, Mike. I ain't dyin' for this fuck!" 

He loved being talked about like he wasn't in the room. "Oh, I don't know about that," Logan replied drolly, staring hard at the stringbean with the gun. "And besides, you ain't a true fanatic if you ain't willin' to die for your cause." Logan looked at Mike, and gave him a slow, evil smile that seemed to make his violent shaking increase. "Come on, Mike - let's do this thing." 

That got Logan the reaction he had been hoping for - stringbean pulled the trigger, but rather than shooting Mike, he shot him in the back of the head. The force of the bullet's impact dropped him to his knees, black spots exploding before his eyes and nearly blotting out the light, and Mike was so startled he bobbled the detonator, not pressing the trigger, but only because his palms were so slick with sweat he almost lost hold of the damn thing. 

The bullet had taken a queer ricochet off his skull, though, as when the ringing in Logan's ears subsided, he heard, " - fuckin' shot me! You fuckin' bastard, you shot me!" 

"Give me the detonator, Mike!" Stringbean roared, over the wailing of his accidentally shot friend. 

Mike's wide, pale eyes glanced fearfully at his friend, and that's when Logan made his move. 

It was actually easier since he was on his knees. He lunged upward, towards Mike, and as he swung his arm around, he popped his claws. Stringbean fired again, hitting Logan in the back, but his adamantium laced spinal cord absorbed most of the blow as the small underground club filled with Mike's piteous, near hysterical howling. 

Logan pivoted on his heels to face the rest of them, detonator in his hand. He threw Mike's now severed left hand at their feet, and slowly retracted his claws. "You know what the ultimate irony of this is?" Logan asked, as the men seemed unable to stop staring at the bloody hand on the floor. Maybe one of them saw the blood fountaining from the stump of Mike's wrist as he cowered in the corner, because one of the cops suddenly leaned over and vomited violently onto the cement floor. What, hadn't they been at crime scenes before? "This won't kill me. But I bet it'll kill all of you." His thumb caressing the trigger, he said, "Drop the guns. They've done fuck all for ya anyways." 

"You wouldn't dare," Stringbean challenged. 

Logan smiled at him, that wicked, predatory grin. He honestly felt like laughing, and maybe that showed on his face. "It's been my plan all along, asshole." 

Those that still had guns dutifully dropped them on the floor, although the gut shot guy was slumped against the wall, arms around his stomach as he moaned, and a fairly significant puddle of blood was starting to form beneath him. Logan wondered if the ricochet had passed through an artery or a major organ - if so, that poor fuck was already dead. Even if someone rang an ambulance on a cell phone right this second, he'd be finished by the time they got here. Either that was bad luck or bad karma, or both. 

But Stringbean held onto his gun, eyes scudding from his face to his hand, as if judging whether he could shoot the detonator out of it, or simply wondering where his claws had gone. "You just proved our entire point, motherfucker! You're not even human! You're a fucking animal!" 

"They don't call me Wolverine because of the fur," he replied, and then nodded his head towards his gun. "You gonna lose it, or do you want to drop another one of your men?" 

Stringbean gave him a look that could have blistered paint, but he dropped the gun. "What the fuck is it you want, freak?" He growled, defiant to the end. The hate was coming off him in waves, like heat from the pavement. "A medal?" 

"I want the name of your "Grand Dragon" or whatever the fuck, and don't insult my intelligence by claimin' to be him, 'cause I know none of you are. Talk, and you get to hobble out of here with your lives. Piss me off, and I'm blowin' the fuckin' house down." 

Stringbean continued to glare at him hatefully, just itching to attack him. He was welcome to, as far as Logan was concerned. "No you won't. An explosion would kill you, no matter how tough you think you are." 

"I've lived through 'em before." Was that true? He didn't even know. "Have any of you?" 

From the way he slid completely to the floor, the gut shot guy had passed out. Only one of the four men still standing glanced back at him; the rest were looking at Logan, or more precisely, the detonator in his hand. "Give me the name." He said quietly, finger on the trigger. Just a little more pressure, and they'd all find out if he could survive a blast. The funny thing was, Logan almost found himself curious about it. Of course, it was bound to hurt like fuck, but what if it was the thing that could kill him? 

Logan heard the man outside, heard him chamber a round in the sawed off shotgun before he even appeared in the upstairs doorway, looking down at him, barrels aimed down at his head. "Drop it, freak," the man growled. "If a muscle so much as twitches, I'll blow your fucking hand off." 

Logan looked up at him and smiled humorlessly, still keeping the corner of his eye on the anxious Stringbean and his friends. Blow his hand off? Really? Shotgun shells that could cut through adamantium? That he had to see. "I think we got us a Mexican standoff," Logan said, feeling oddly giddy. Did Shotgun Billy up there really think this would change a goddamn thing? "Wanna see who's quicker on the draw, bub?" 

There was a thick silence as the men waited for the power to shift, for Logan to show fear, doubt, hesitancy, but of course he didn't - this changed nothing. Except, of course, when they were all going to die. 

Logan waited for the men to decide what they were going to do. After all, he had his thumb on the button. 

He had all the time in the world. 

14 

    John Hayes only looked at the clock when his tape of the Blue Jays game from last year finished up. He had no idea it was that late. 

He knew he should turn it over to the news, see if it was done, but wasn't George going to call him? The phone hadn't rung all evening. Had something gone wrong? 

No, that was stupid - what could possibly go wrong? 

That was the one good thing about forced "retirement" - he finally got to see all these shows and games he had taped over the years, but never found the time to see. Too bad he was almost at the end of the tapes. 

He had wandered off to the bathroom to take a leak when he heard that damn dog start barking again. Some guard dog he turned out to be - he barked at every leaf rustled by the breeze. All that money training him, pissed away. 

Just as he flushed, he heard the dog ... what was that noise? It sounded like a high whimper, but it happened so fast ... but he was quiet now, wasn't he? 

John started towards the front door, overcome with a sudden eerie feeling. He'd only left a single light on in the kitchen ( if you didn't count the blue light of the television, which made it seem like he lived in a whitewashed, cold world, devoid of color but teeming with life he could only spy as pixilated shadows ) so the house - his strange house, somehow too large and too confining all at once - seemed sinister. Anything could be hiding in these clinging shadows, in the empty spaces of his aggressively vacant home. 

He opened the front door and looked out at the front yard, and only when the cold wind blew in did he realize how vulnerable he felt, barefoot and clad only in sweat pants and a t-shirt starting to tear at the collar. But how stupid a thought was that? Everyone here knew who he was and what he used to be - he had carefully cultivated his "grumpy old coot who lives in the big house at the end of the cul de sac" image. It kept kids away, and any nosy neighbors from the neighboring street at bay. 

The air smelled of leaf mold and dog shit, and there didn't look like anything was amiss; the front gate appeared both closed and locked. But where was that damn dog? "Duke!" He called impatiently. "Come 'ere you stupid dog! Duke!" 

Usually, the stupid mastiff would have come running by now - it knew what the tone of his voice meant. But not only did it not come running, it was almost frighteningly quiet out here. There was no noise but the slap and rustle of branches in the breeze, the creak of the house settling in its silence ... those creaks over his head were just the house settling, right? 

For a moment he listened for footsteps overhead, taken with the image that he had an intruder in his house, an intruder who had taken out Duke and was now upstairs, waiting for him to come up ... 

He shook his head and angrily dismissed the thought, slamming the door. He chose this damn house because it was so quiet, isolated from both street noises and annoying neighbors. And Duke was almost two hundred pounds of mastiff - that alone scared most people off. To take him down with drugs, you'd need to get a hold of some serious tranquilizers, and most thieves didn't bother with shit like that; and if they did get some "special K", they were more likely to take it themselves. And he didn't hear footsteps, and he knew that he would if there were any to be heard - the only sound in the house right now was the white noise hiss of the t.v. as the tape rewound, and he had the volume so low that he could barely hear it over the wind. 

Then there was the simple bottom line: he was a former Chief of Police. What thief was shit for brains stupid enough to bust into a cop's house? And it wasn't like any of the trees were close enough to the house - how in the fuck could any thief enter from the second story? Well, maybe if he was Spider-Man or something. Perhaps a thief on really tall stilts. 

He was chuckling to himself as he wandered out to the kitchen, helping himself to another can of beer. He couldn't believe he was going to have to break out the spare twenty four pack already - he hadn't had that much to drink yet. But the days were blurring together, and he couldn't even remember the last time he left the house; most of the business he had could be conducted by phone, or his boys could come see him. John didn't want to think of himself as pathetic or a shambles, but he knew he was slowly going the way of his life. 

He had just cracked open the can of Molson's and paused to look out the kitchen window when he noticed a dark reflection in the glass. 

His heart beating double time, he pivoted on his heels, and there, standing just beyond the kitchen entryway, was the shadow of a man. He was in the living room, and the ghost light of static back lit him, so he was a form without face, a shadow independent of a body. He was  broad shouldered and carried his arms at his side like a prizefighter waiting for a match to start, and for an instant, John would have sworn his heart had stopped. "Dustin - " he said, and the moment it was out of his mouth, he winced and regretted it. That was idiotic - the dead didn't come back; the only people who believed in ghosts were people who couldn't deal with reality. 

"Is that why you did this?" The man said. His voice was a deep rumble, and it sounded parched somehow, seared. 

"I don't know who the fuck you are, but you'd better get out of my house this instant!" He snapped, showing anger but no fear. Crooks were like dogs; they could smell fear, and went for it. "Do you have any fuckin' idea who I am?' 

"John "Sonny" Hayes, former police chief of Calgary," the shadow man replied, slowly moving into the penumbra of light cast off by the kitchen. 

John instantly wished he hadn't. 

He knew why he had moved with inhuman quiet now - he was barefoot. His clothes fit wrong, and looked familiar ... because they were Dustin's; no wonder he thought he was him at first. The jeans were too baggy and sagged at the waist, but the blue t-shirt he'd taken was almost too small, and clung to him like a second skin, revealing an almost absurdly chiseled chest and virtually no stomach at all - this guy was no thief, he was a fucking bodybuilder. No crook ever looked like he worked out on a regular basis. 

But his face ... 

He must have been in a hideous accident. Half his face was raw flesh pink, and his hair on that side had been cropped down to a nub, and it looked like part of his left ear was missing. The raw flesh continued down the side of his neck too, disappearing beneath the shirt, and John wondered if it continued down his side. His left arm looked a bit raw, didn't it? 

Something was off on his right side as well. The skin looked more or less normal there, but shiny as if new, baby flesh. He had a hint of dark stubble tracing his jawline, and while his hair was desperately short on that side, it wasn't scraped down to root like it was on the left. 

He briefly wondered if he was a vagrant, but that didn't make sense. A ripped vagrant? Fuck - a hideously maimed guy who still pumped iron didn't make a lot of sense either. "What the fuck happened to you?" He asked, only because his curiosity got the better of him. Not that he cared, but fuck, did somebody feed half his face into a meat grinder? 

The man had green eyes that were remarkably hard and cold, glaring at him with a hate that was almost clinical, like he knew he couldn't help being a vicious animal, as that was a hazard of his breed. He really didn't like being on the receiving end of that look. "Purity. Your brainchild, yes?" 

John shook his head. "Who the fuck are you?" Maybe he was just a nutjob - strong nutjobs happened with frightening regularity. 

"You should be asking what the fuck I am," the man growled. 

Definitely a nutjob. "So what the fuck are you?" 

"I am the living ghost, the thing that won't die. Maybe it's like what the Buddhists believe - reincarnation. But in that case, you die and come back as something else. Me, I always end up at the very same place I was before. Maybe I'm supposed to do something or learn something before I can move on, I don't know. That's what they say about reincarnation, isn't it?" 

John put his can of beer down on the counter, and realized the phone was within easy reach. "Are you high?" 

The guy snorted a derisive laugh that sounded almost painful. "I wish I could be. I don't think ... I think my brain is still recovering from the blast, you know? Concussion. I've been mostly operating on instinct." 

"The blast?" What the fuck was this about? He couldn't possibly mean ... no, he didn't look like a guy he'd seen recruited. 

"He actually thought he could beat me," the man said, either ignoring or not noticing John's casual drift towards the phone. "A Human, with better reflexes than me? He had time to tense on the trigger - but that was it. Stupid shit thought I was bluffin'. I never bluff outside of poker games." 

"Who the hell are you talking about?" 

"Jerry. Detective Jerry McManus, he said his name was. The initial concussion wave of the blast traveled up the stairs and threw him clear - he was hurt, but not badly at all. He probably could have shook it off and walked away. But I think ... I think I may have broke him." 

John had almost reached for the phone, but stopped. That was a curious turn of phrase - and how did he know Jerry? "What do you mean?" 

"When I crawled out of the wreckage. I mean, the big damage - the internal stuff - was probably healed before I regained consciousness. But when I got so much healin' to do, it takes time, as you can see." He gestured to his ruined face. Did - was his hair now longer than before on the left side? No, that was impossible ... "And you know, when most of your skin is gone, the wind hurts. It's like acid rain. I guess I must have looked a sight, 'cause the moment he saw me he just started screamin'. I mean banshee howls, like he was the blonde bimbo in a horror movie and I was the dildo with the chainsaw." 

John snatched up the receiver, sure this guy was a complete psycho nutjob, and brought it to his ear ... only to hear nothing, not even a dial tone. He cradled the receiver with a resigned sigh. "You cut the telephone line." 

The maimed man nodded, but faintly, as if too deep a nod hurt the burned skin on his neck. "I thought about cuttin' the power, but didn't see the point." 

"Did you kill the dog?" 

"No. I don't hurt animals unless I absolutely have to; they're better than Humans. I just scared him into submission - I have a better growl." 

It was just then that John heard a noise that raised the hair on the back of his neck. It was a deep, menacing growl, the kind made by a beast that would not only rip your throat out but enjoy every second of doing so, and for a second he thought Duke had gotten inside the house. But Duke's growl wasn't half that powerful, and it seemed to be coming from the direction of the mutilated man. He was making that noise? 

No, no he couldn't be - no human being could make a noise like that. He must have had a recorder somewhere, was playing something off a tape. How he didn't hear it click on or off he had no idea. "I suggest you leave while you can. My son is - " 

" - not here," the man interrupted. "No one's been upstairs except you and the dog for a very long time. You're wife's gone, right? And the clothes of your boy smell musty, as if they should have been mothballed a long time ago." 

"Smell?" He asked incredulously. "What the fuck are you, some kinda bloodhound?" 

"Somethin' like that. What happened to the family, John? Jerry said you blamed mutants for ruinin' your life, but he didn't say how. He was babblin', pretty far into hysteria when I left him. That's what I mean by I think I broke him - I broke his mind. He sounded like the fruitcake he really must o' been to do this thing. What's your excuse for mass murder, John? What lets you sleep at night?" 

He had no idea what this fucking lunatic was on about, but he hated him; in this moment he hated him with a fiery, sour vengeance that made him see red. "I haven't murdered anyone, you lyin' sack of shit! You want to know what those fuckin' muties did to me?" He reached up, and dug into his left eye with a movement so familiar it was rote by now. He plucked out the hard, lukewarm glass eye and held it out to the scarred man, feeling the peculiar emptiness of his eye socket. That was worse than not being able to see out of that side  - the emptiness, the feeling of void. "One of those gene trash spit acid in my face, and I lost this, you crazy shit. And that was the just the beginning of what I lost thanks to those animals." 

The disfigured man appeared unmoved, waiting for more. His eyes were so hard they could have been made of glass themselves. "Then, if that wasn't enough, another one of those fuckin' bastards trumped up a police brutality charge against me. I had to cut a deal to retire early to save my name from bein' smeared in the press." 

"So you were guilty," the man said flatly. "Innocent men don't cut deals." 

"Yer a self-righteous bastard, aren't ya?" He snapped. This man didn't deserve to know a goddamn thing about him or his life. And that fucking maniac took his eye, for Christ's sake - so what if one of his mutie brothers got a few broken bones? That was the price you paid for fucking with the law. "So my wife left me - the selfish bitch - after our boy Dusty died in a plane crash. There were rumors it was 'cause of some mutie bastard, but the American FAA refuses to release that kind of info." 

"So this is where I break down and weep for ya, is that it?" The man replied with cold disdain. "I'm supposed to apologize for all my kind, and agree that killing bunches of us - kids, you fucker, kids - was justified?" 

It was then he noticed that the man's skin was moving. 

On the left side of his ruined face, it seemed be ... crawling?.. and changing color as ... oh god. Oh Christ in heaven, his skin was growing back. 

It was growing over the burned skin like some kind of living, animate stain, and dark stubble started popping out along his jawline underneath the new skin. And his hair was thicker now, growing slowly but steadily; it looked like it was moving in a gentle, constant breeze. 

And it looked like the cartilage of his left ear was almost boiling ... filling out, coming back. 

Mutant. Fucking mutant freak. 

But honestly, hadn't he known that all along? Hadn't he expected, on some level, that at least one would hunt him down someday? Hunt him down, and help him prove to the world how animalistic and sub-human they were. "So it happened, did it? It went off, and you were near it." He put his eye back in, because he always felt naked without it. Also, he didn't like the feeling of air entering the hole, reminding him of the sudden gap in his face, in his life. He had the permanent blind spot if he needed any other reminder. 

The man shook his head faintly, the muscles along his jaw tensing, making cords stand out on his still slightly raw neck. "I was inside it. I set it off, you vicious fuck - after evacuating the place. You didn't kill any mutants tonight; you only killed your men." 

"Bullshit." That wasn't possible - it couldn't be. The scam was perfect, and Smythe and Hunt knew damn well how to handle explosives; they'd never get caught in it. 

The freak studied him for a long time, and his scrutiny was uncomfortable - it was like he was looking straight through him. Was he? Muties could do shit like that. "What? You need time to think up a better lie?" 

The freak shook his head dismissively. "You knew you'd eventually fail, didn't you? You convinced your men they'd succeed, but you knew the "accidents" would eventually draw attention. But you honestly didn't care, did you? You didn't even care what happened to them as long as you got to kill a bunch of muties before it all came crashin' down, huh?" 

"Shut your face," he snapped. "You don't know shit, freak." 

"I do - you're pathetic. You're like Farris." 

"Who?" That wasn't one of the guys, was it? 

The freak snorted again, and his face looked almost perfectly normal now; the raw skin on his neck was submerging beneath shiny new flesh. "I wanted you to be like Branson - rotten to the core. A fuck with no conscious, a pure sociopath with a badge. But you're just a bitter, twisted little man, a wounded animal just lashin' out at the weakest thing you can find, usin' your men to do your dirty work." 

"Shut the fuck up!" He demanded, feeling his face flush in rage. He hated it; he hated even showing contempt towards this animal - it was more than he deserved. Why didn't he keep a gun in the kitchen? Fuck, he was an idiot for keeping them all in a cabinet in the den. 

But what if the story he was telling was true? What if he was in the explosion, and survived it? That seemed unbelievable, but what couldn't a freak do? If he had - if he survived being that badly maimed - would a bullet do anything to him? 

The freak sneered at him, like he was below contempt - like he was the freak. "I hurt, you asshole. Comin' here, I felt like I was walkin' on broken glass, and bein' cut by a thousand razor blades. But I knew when I got here I was gonna share some of that pain - I was gonna hurt you, old man, like you've never been hurt before. Then I was gonna rip your fucking head off, and not even use my claws." 

Claws? He glanced at the man's hands, but he looked like he had plain old fingernails - they weren't even long, either. 

The freak then shook his head again, more vehemently, and made a face like he had just tasted something bad. "But you're not even worth my time. You're nothing. You're a warped motherfucker stewing in his own juices - " 

"Don't you dare talk to me like that, you fucking freak of nature!" He roared, letting his rage spill out. For so long he wanted to look one of these freaks in the face and spit in their eye - he was just sorry he couldn't spit acid as well. "You dirty bastards robbed me of everything! I won't let you rob my species too!" 

But the hard, arrogant glint was back in the man's stony eyes, and he was convinced this was proof that mutants had nothing like a soul, not like real people. "You robbed yourself, John. You failed as a cop, as a husband, and now you're blamin' the one thing that ever put the hurt on you. To your sad little followers, you made it a cause - but to you, it's nothing more than a grudge." He made a disdainful noise and looked away. "Some criminal mastermind you are. You're just a sad little man with connections - " 

"Shut up!" He shouted, and threw open the nearest drawer on his right. He groped blindly for a knife, closed his hand around a wooden handle, and took a wild stab at the mutie who dared to wear his son's clothes. 

He was aiming for the heart - assuming the freak had a heart, and in the right place - but he must have been off slightly, hit a rib, or something - how else could he explain the tempered steel blade of the butcher knife shattering like it was made of glass, the instant the tip penetrated the freak's skin? He still held the wooden hilt when the freak grabbed him by the throat and slammed him back against the counter so hard John was surprised his spine hadn't snapped on impact. 

The freak had a grip like a vise, like his bones were made of metal, and John feared that with just a little more pressure he could crush every single bone in his neck, or maybe even break the skin and just rip his goddamn windpipe out. And he reeked of blood - blood and burned flesh, and he knew he had already killed someone tonight. As it was he couldn't draw a single breath, and the freak was right in his face, glaring at him with more animalistic rage than he had ever seen, even in his twenty plus years on the force. The man's eyes were almost demonic, so far beyond Human in their sheer hatred it was like looking into the eyes of the Devil himself. 

And that's when he knew the freak was going to kill him. 

The freak started to shake, his muscles trembled, and even through the redness filling his vision, John could see something going on behind the mutie's eyes, something he couldn't recognize. Unless it was a war, a battle internalized; the muscles not trembling from exertion, but from him trying to hold his own impulses back. And losing. 

Blood thundered in his ears, and his lungs actually felt like they were going to explode from the lack of air, and he wished this freak would just snap his neck; he didn't want to die like this, by strangulation. Almost any death was better than that. 

Suddenly the mutie let him go and turned away with a noise that was half growl, half frustrated grunt. John collapsed to his hands and knees on the tiled floor and choked as he sucked in air desperately, like a drowning man. He hadn't crushed his windpipe or his larynx, but it had been a very close thing - an iota more pressure, and he'd still be busy asphyxiating on the floor. Bile burned in the back of his throat, but he swallowed it back as best he could. He wasn't puking in front of this maggot. 

"Not this way," the freak was muttering to himself. "Not like this." 

When he was able to breathe again, and was sure he could talk without vomiting, he rasped, "Why don't you just rip my head off like you said you would, you fuckin' circus freak?" It hurt to talk, and he wasn't sure he had the strength to stand up just yet. 

The mutie stalked back towards him, snarling like the animal he was, and John was pretty sure this was finally it. But maybe this time he wouldn't strangle him. 

The freak grabbed him by the hair and yanked him violently to his feet, still snarling, his breath reeking of blood, upper lip curled back to reveal a sharp looking canine tooth that was several millimeters short of a fang. This freak really was an animal, wasn't he? 

But as he glared at him, something changed in the mutie's face; he looked almost puzzled by something he must have seen in his eye. For some reason, he let go of him and backed off, and John had to hang on to the counter to stay on his feet. "What, you chickenshit?" He rasped painfully. "Ain't you got no balls?" 

The freak gave him a confused look that soon gave way to an expression John had seen far too many times in his life - pity. He wanted to shoot it off his fucking freak face. "You want me to kill you." 

"Stop tryin' to cover up your own spinelessness!" He tried to shout, but it hurt too much. He had to settle for a gravelly growl, not unlike the noises the freak made. "Do what you were born to do, you fucking animal, you fucking piece of gene trash! Kill me!" 


	8. Part 8

The freak looked startled, and actually took a step back. John felt tears inexplicably come to his eye, but he blinked them back as best he could, and growled, "Kill me, damn it. Finish what you started, you cocksucker." 

The look on the freak's face transformed once more, back to something harder and more calculated. "You're such a cowardly shit you can't even kill yourself, can ya?" 

"You think I'm gonna let you off scot free, huh? There'll be a manhunt for you within the hour - no one assaults cops and gets away with it." 

He cocked his head to the side, and looked at him like he was a fascinating bug he just discovered under a rock. "I heard sirens when I left Harvey Street. They're gonna find the illegal club full of dead cops, and with no one - or very few left - to cover it up, it's gonna look just like what it was: sabotage. And ravin' looney McManus - do you really think he'll go down for this alone? Do you think he wants to go to prison and get passed around between the cons like a cigarette? I don't think he was prepared to be a martyr for the cause, John. Are you?" 

He sat back against the counter, his back aching from where he met the edge of it earlier, and he sneered at the freak, resenting the tears he could feel coursing down his cheek. He convinced himself it was only due to pain, but right now he didn't know and he didn't care.  "Do it, you motherfucking freak. Finish this." 

"I already have," he said coldly, and turned away. 

Was he leaving? He couldn't leave! "Get back here!" He managed a shout, even though it scraped his tortured throat raw. "You motherfucking freak! Coward!" But he heard the front door open and close, and knew he was gone. 

John sagged to the floor with an anguished cry that died in his throat, ending up as little more than a painful squeak. It would have been worth it; just to see some dead muties on the news, and it all would have been worth it. His life wouldn't have been a complete waste. Right? It would have mattered; it would have meant something. 

How low had he sunk? Somehow he couldn't even manage his own murder right. 

15 

    As soon as he left the Hayes house, Logan sat down on the front step, aching and exhausted from both exertion and fighting his own rage. He leaned down, head resting on his knees in what might be called a pseudo "crash position" ( he knew he might have chuckled at that had he had the strength ), and he let the cool night air caress his new skin, still burning underneath due to healing. Air wasn't so bad when you had all your skin. 

The stone step was cold beneath him, and he wished either John or his son had shoes in his size, but no, of course not; that had been asking too much. He was lucky to have found some clothes that fit him. 

He wanted to pass out. The raw rage and adrenaline that had been fueling him had dwindled; everything in his body was screaming for rest, and he had to fight it, and the fight was draining. Logan had a feeling if he let his body have its way, he might not be conscious for a long time, and he wanted to finish this. Maybe if he had truly known how pathetic Hayes was, he could have let himself rest. 

He knew he had to get up and go before he just collapsed here, and he forced himself to move, to stand up, when he heard a single gunshot inside the house. 

John had finally found the wherewithal to kill himself. Two days late and a dollar fucking short, the dickhead. 

Logan made his way across the dewy grass, soothing to his newly healed feet, to the front gate. He heard  the dog - what did Hayes call him? Duke? What an awful name - still whimpering, hiding beneath a privet hedge. He hadn't meant to scare it so badly, but he was in a fucking world of hurt and rage and had no time to fuck around with it. As he opened the gate, he decided to leave it open, so Duke could escape. He was probably better off with the neighbors or animal control than a dead owner, and if he was really freaked when the cops finally came around, they might have to shoot him. It was the only kindness he could offer the beast, who had no decision in who came to own it. 

Logan only had to walk up the road, as he had parked his truck at the head of the street, off to one side. He hadn't wanted Hayes to hear him coming, but he doubted now he was that observant. Still, when he intended to get the drop on someone, he didn't take chances. 

He couldn't believe he was able to drive in his condition - there was blood all over the front seat. His blood, which always smelled extra metallic to him, like the adamantium was somehow leeching into it, trying to take over the very cellular structure of his plasma. He still got into the driver's seat, ignoring the squelch of blood, and just drove. He had no direction in mind, no destination - like always, he just wanted to be away. 

He drove until his vision became blurry, until headlights became smears of light on the windshield, and he was sorry Calgary seemed to have no forests at all. Even in a car, forests were a good place to hide, get lost. He was an expert at finding places where nobody cared. 

He drove past a stadium that, according to its neon signboard, seemed mainly to exist as a venue for rodeos and country western concerts. Well, yeehaw, because it was surrounded by large parking lots. 

He found what seemed to be a relatively secure spot, hard to see from the road, and parked his truck. He had just finished locking the doors when he collapsed onto the bloody cab seat. He pulled down the flannel shirt he had taken off earlier and used it as a sort of paltry blanket, covering his chest, trapping the heat of his fevered healing close to his aching body. 

It was the last thing he remembered doing before he lost consciousness, finally giving in to the dark tide of exhaustion swamping him, and he wondered if it would ever make all the pain go away. 

16 

    No dreams but one. 

No pain this time, no violence, so it seemed immediately wrong. He was in a soft bed, covered by cotton sheets so sleek they were almost silk, and he felt half asleep but remarkably good. He could tell by smell it was a woman's bed, a woman he would swear he didn't know, and yet her scent seemed to make his stomach clench, turn to stone, ramp his heartbeat up double time. Suddenly he could feel her pressed against his back, her face nuzzling the nape of his neck, her breath warm against his skin. 

Of course it felt good, but he knew - in the part of himself that should be conscious and awake - that this was bad. In the dream (?) he was fine, relaxed, but his other self was panicking; it felt like there was a coal ember lodged beneath his breastbone. He did not want to be here - this was bad, this was pain beyond all other pain - he should not be here. 

It didn't matter that it made no sense at all - why the memory (?) of a woman who seemed to want him would scare him so much - he woke up with a jolt all the same. He didn't have long to puzzle over it, though, because as soon as he was conscious his kidneys began to ache fiercely; his bladder had absolutely hit critical mass. 

It was a struggle to get out of the truck, and he took a monster piss behind the stadium, marveling that the sky was a delicate shade of deep violet, giving way to pink at the edges of the horizon - sunrise? He felt a lot more logy - and restored - than if he'd just slept a few hours. Had he slept an entire day away? No wonder his bladder was about to explode. He should have guessed this would happen - when his body had major healing to do, sometimes it just like to shut down. A little death, he supposed, just not permanent. He must have died a thousand times. 

He was starving too, and his tongue felt like a dead thing in his mouth - he seemed to have no saliva at all. Once he got back in his truck, he noticed that his blood had dried to a crust on the seat and on his clothes, and made the whole cab smell metallic. Man, he was going to have to spend a day cleaning up, wasn't he? 

He went to a fast food drive in and ordered twenty bucks worth of food, and about a quart of orange juice. He really didn't care that the food was barely edible, and the orange juice had the tinny aftertaste of a concentrate; he was ravenous, and felt dehydrated. 

He knew why as he listened to the news on the radio. He hadn't slept one day - he'd slept two. Shit. He didn't know he could do that. Well, he did blow himself up - what did he expect? 

There was a continuing investigation into the explosion, and some controversy had sprung up around it, but he had no real interest in it, and tuned it out. He had shut them down - his part in this was done. What the rest of Purity did was up to them, but considering how easily they were laid low by a single mutant, he bet they'd reconsider their next moves. 

He was able to sneak into a store before they noticed he was barefoot, and buy some new boots before they  realized he hadn't come in with his own. He bought some new clothes, and when the counter girl asked his about all the "rust stains", he dismissed it as paint. People were willing to believe anything as long as you were casual about it. 

Logan drove to the seedy side of town, and found a sleazy motel that rented out rooms by the hour. He bought himself an hour and had a nice, long shower, getting rid of the dried blood that coated him like some horrific outbreak of eczema. It didn't matter that the room was so filthy he felt he needed a shower after his shower - it'd have to do. 

Once he'd changed into his new clothes, he almost felt like a sentient being again, and headed out to find a self-service car wash. That took longer than he thought, but finally he found one, and cleaned out the front seat as best he could, at least until he got rid of most of the blood smell. He supposed it would always linger a bit, but hell, he could live with it. He'd lived with worse. 

Later on, when he was sitting in the newly cleaned cab in a supermarket parking lot, gulping down the six pack of beer he'd just bought for himself, he went over what he had. Not a lot. His funds were almost tapped out, but he figured he'd be okay until he got to the Yukon. Oh, maybe he could get in a "pick up" fight or two along the way in B.C. - he was going to take the longer route, through British Columbia, because there was no way in hell he was fucking around with the mountain pass towns right now - but just for gas money and beer. The big money was in the Yukon, and he might as well waste his time where it earned him the most. 

Sitting there, staring out at the every day people doing their mundane tasks, buying groceries and corralling their kids, he wondered if a grudge - if the consumptive desire for revenge - left everyone as pathetic and hollowed out as Hayes in the end. If hate could consume you like a corrosive poison, and taint your entire life. 

Was it possible he knew Hayes so well because a part of him was like him? That there was some resonance, no matter how small? Maybe he just wore it better because, in the end, it was helpless to permanently mar him, just like everything else. 

No, that couldn't be true; he wasn't like Hayes. This hadn't been about revenge or hate - this had been about stopping these dickheads in their tracks, and about getting some measly kind of justice for Fidget. Shit, he'd almost forgotten about Fidget. How ironic - he wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for him. 

Did it matter? Purity was finished, and the man that had probably ordered his death had stuck a gun barrel in his empty eye socket and painted the den with his brains. If that wasn't exactly justice, it was the next best thing, wasn't it? 

He reached for the keys in the ignition and then stopped. Shit shit shit! No, he was not going to do that! He had no obligations - what he decided to do he had done; he was through, out, over. 

Oh, goddamn it. He hated himself sometimes - he really, really did. 

17 

    Deborah Kean walked down the garden path of her home in suburban Calgary, and checked the mailbox at the end of the driveway. 

It was an unseasonably chilly day, but sunny, and birdsong filled the air as she shuffled through the usual dreary assortment of bills, notices, and junk mail.For a long time she had checked the mailbox eagerly, hoping for some kind of letter or postcard from Gordon - wherever he was - but after ten months of nothing but crushed hopes, she had given up. He was never writing, he was never coming home. She supposed she had come to accept that now, but it was no less defeating. Maybe they weren't a perfect family, and maybe Mitch could be too hard on him, but was that any reason to drop out of school and abandon your family entirely? He was stubborn, just like his father. Perhaps she should have expected this all along. 

It was when she was closing the door of the little metal mailbox - Kean stenciled on its side in black block letters - that a folded square of paper fell from the stack of bills and drifted to the cement driveway. 

She looked at it curiously before bending down to pick it up, glancing up and down the street in case someone had just thrown it in their box. But there was no one out on the sidewalks now, just Mr. Montand walking his Scottish terrier, and they were on the opposite side of the street and rather far away. 

A note from the mailman? There was no writing on the outside at all; obviously it hadn't been mailed. It was just a square of torn off notepad paper, nothing special, although she could see black ink shadows through the thin paper. 

She unfolded it warily, and found there was little written on the page, and all of it was at the top. In writing that was surprisingly angular and very unfamiliar, it read, in its entirety: "Gordon was a good kid. Don't let anyone tell you different." The note was unsigned. 

Deborah stared at it for the longest time, as if trying to read between the two terse sentences, until her eyes grew blurry with tears. Was - past tense. Did they just mean he was before he ran away, or did they mean ... no, they couldn't mean that. Could they? 

But didn't she suspect that? Didn't something in her tell her he was dead? 

This could be some horrible joke, a prank, a cruel trick ... but why? And why now? 

She sat down on the cold driveway and cried, clutching the note in her hand, and not really caring how foolish she looked. Maybe this note was proof of something, proof that maybe he had a friend out there who had never abandoned him. 

The best thing she could hope for was that her Gordon hadn't died alone. 

****  
The End 


End file.
